Winter's Eve
by Ganimyde
Summary: What if there was a night they had met again in the middle of their journey? What if there were events they couldn't remember, yet that inextricably catapulted them onto their path? 1st Series, Pre-Movie. Sp: Movie.
1. Chapter 1

**Title**: Winter's Eve

**Fandom**: Fullmetal Alchemist (1st Series)

**Setting**: Just pre-movie

**Spoilers**: End of Series, movie.

**Rating**: Mature/R

**Warnings**: Swearing, grittiness (hurray), drinking. Religious themes I tried to get right. Later on: a smidge of bloodshed (yay!)

Oh yeah, and, it's me and FMA, so...trippy. Got a lot of circular workings of a depressed mind in parts. Slight warning for already-depressed people. Though, the action balances it out, I feel. Yay explosions.

Also: You'll need your visual thinking-caps for today's read! And yes, that description of ice really happened, I'm not just crazy. It was how the fic was born. :]

**Summary**: What if there was a night they had met again in the middle of the journey? What if there were events they couldn't remember yet inextricably catapulted them into their path?

**Note**: Like all my fics, I like trying to make them as realistic as possible. I've worked on this for about three years now(_Memorial _took four), and I think it's time to share it. Please tell me what you think of this first part. The characters are a bit ... different, and I want to know what you find noteworthy or not. :) Please review, that's the only way that I know you want to see more. Plus, I don't bite. It's not like I'm getting paid (as FMA does not belong to me)---your comments are all I got. :P

* * *

**Full Metal Alchemist: Winter's Eve**

The journey of Alphonse Elric dragged on. The search was young compared to what he and his brother had supposedly gone through Before, but the promise of a solution was much easier to follow when you had a map to all the pieces.

He walked this night, as he did many nights, just to see where it would take him. Silently, with his hands hidden deep in his sweeping red winter coat's pockets, he took in the snowy night of East City. The steps of his black boots were muffled, an unnatural quiet in a red-light district. An unnaturally clean white covering that glimmered in the city's darkness and only drove deeper the dirt and crime.

Should he just believe what everyone said, that his brothers was already dead. . . .

The black-bricked, tightly-packed apartment buildings slicked with grime cleared along the narrow cobble road and the river, calm and collected, came into view. The many footprints wandering over the sidewalk converged into one single set along the bridge, vaguely-human trenches several inches deep.

Not one to disturb the path of many, he set his feet in them as well, slowly making his way out onto the bridge. Halfway out into the eerie hush, he stopped, considering the path in the snow. The shadows from the yellow lamps somewhere above his head radiated into the holes, while the snow was cast in a glowing haze. Like the maw of a fire, waiting to swallow him up in its endless, repeating continuance.

After a while of staring at the lights against the dark sky, Alphonse looked out onto the water. Snow fled from his worn black shoes and the footprints became an empty mass pushed out from beneath the sideguard. He brushed off the top-most metal railing, round, worn, and cold, and then set his arms atop it, pulling his body up so that he stood on the bottom-most railing of the many.

His breath came out in grey plumes as he watched over the dark river, mimicking the smoke dependably churning out of the factories that flanked the slender banks. He put his chin on his folded forearms and let the silent black expanse take his mind away.

It was not so much that he had lost hope, he considered while he surveyed the gentle curve of the flat, broad river, his eyes not quite able to make out the differences in the shades of black and blue. It was more that, on nights like to these, he had no one. There was no one he could share his thoughts with; no one would be there when he finished his day. His discoveries went only to his own self, and at the end of the elation, there was still a room void of anyone but him and chill, warped floorboards to be his keeper. What few beautiful things he found in life, there was no one to tell. But what he missed the most acutely was the person who would stand beside him and gently listen, and then take his hand and show him the world in return.

As the flakes drifted down from the soundless night sky, Al wondered, really wondered, if his brother was up there instead.

* * *

Dear Brother. _January 4th, 1917_. Me again, of course. I went down to the river in East City the other night—did you ever come here?—and even though it was bitterly cold, and the bad part of town(cheap hotel), it was quiet. The river was freezing over, gently, in a way I'd never seen before: Vaguely round shapes of ice floated under my feet, freezing with concentric rings dark grey in the center and consistently whiter near the ever-growing edges. Like sections of tree cuttings, floating down at their own pace. Something about never knowing when or where the next one would be, how big or small, what message it would try to convey, islands against the river's obsidian pool, took too long to turn away from. And all was silent, except for the hungry lack of reverberation that told you it was some pool you were standing over. It was a black that took you away, a black that was so much different . . . than the skies in Resembool.

In the dark, and the snow, the streetlights just off the bank reflecting in the water. . . . It looked like clouds, the sheets of ice floating lazily across the depthless expanse of dark, a pure liquid obsidian not bothered by reflections nor its limits. It was the sky at night as if there were absolutely no stars, a physical mass that merged with its horizon and yet offered itself up for you to explore as it drew you ever closer.

I'm not sure how long I stood there, watching ice and letting cold seep its way in(I know it sounds silly), but . . .

I wish I could have shown it to you.

When I find you, we'll have to come back here, and you'll tell me see what you too see.

_ Al lifted his ink pen, an old relic of their father's Pinako had had in her house, apparently from before he and his brother were born. He used it now, despite it being a well pen, because it was something from his old life to hold onto, something to ground him to the thought that maybe there was some serendipity in the world. And that maybe it could smile upon __him._

_ He smiled, thinking of the green Resembool hills in the sunshine, for a moment pushing out the chilling cold of the barely-furnished hotel room, and the fact that he didn't have his brother here to tell him these little happinesses he found._

_ He dipped the quill in the bottle once again, and started scratching out scrawling words on the already worn and yellowing journal page._

But there was something else that happened that day that I thought you might want to know about. I'm not sure how I got out of it, and I wasn't sure I would have. You see, I ran into an old "friend" of yours . . .

* * *

_Dear brother,_ Alphonse thought as he gazed over the night and its river, _Have you ever seen ice freezing on a river? Did you ever see it in those years together I can't remember? It's really beautiful. . . . Yes, we could see the river from our house, and even though it froze in the biting winters, we never saw it happen. We'd always wake up the next morning to see crystal rapids frozen in the valley, and the land, strangely quieter. For a while, there were no tracks, no signs of life at all but for our family and the trees we looked upon._

_ It wasn't nearly flat enough to be so unassuming as this. . . . Were we driven like that busy river, to head out somewhere west we couldn't see, for reasons we may not have even known? Why did we run so fast, in that slow, peaceful place, when in this busy, dirty city, the river just takes it time?_

_ I suppose most things stop, when they have no hope left. . . . _He turned his head to the un-wandered side of the river, imagining what lives were being lived-out there. What hardships, what broken dreams ran rampant. . . . Which would never bounce back? Which would transfigure the world into something they wanted?

Al tipped his head and brushed some snow off the railing by his foot, trying to wait a few seconds before he went back to staring at nothing in the black-hole surface of the river, but was unsuccessful. It still held his mind, the unassuming attraction of what the next shape of floating ice would be, when it would be as he stared at ink. He blew out a breath, realizing he just wanted to go to home, and didn't have the heart to get there; so there he waited, watching the vapor be pulled apart in the biting night air.

_But even the river continues on, and by the time it hits its delta, the open sea even, it's a raging torrent again, and it's found what it was searching for. . . . And all in all, the entire journey to look back on was a triumph, a river made from all kinds of tears._

Al sighed and his hands under his arms. "Dear brother," he whispered cynically to the water, "Did you know I can see you in my dreams? That it's the only way I know you're still alive?" He closed his eyes, as unbidden flashes of the Gate—which he only vaguely understood because of Izumi—popped into his mind, quick, bright, and useless. He shuddered, and stared at the railing, voice colorless. "...That it's the only reason I know you still _exist_, somewhere?"

His eyes slid shut, bringing the latest images of Ed: working furiously on massive machines in the middle of the night, muttering about parts and fuels, placing cogs; leaning his entire body to turn wrenches half his size and as wide as his forearms. In other views he was working by candlelight of all things in that same laboratory; orange spheres of light washed onto black formulas pages long. He recognized his brother's scarred hand anywhere, the way it held a pencil, the way it hunched over paper, and the way its created letters deformed from writing with non-dominant muscles. . . . But when Al had awoken, he couldn't remember in the slightest what the formula might have been; the lead to tell him who might work on something like that—who might be holding his brother captive—was gone. He remembered thinking that there had been too many letters for it to be anything he knew of in Amestris, but that caused more problems than it solved.

He hung his head, moaning. _I'm sure that some think I was merely robbed of my sanity and I see these things as an inability to deal with reality. But._

Going down this road never made him happy, but tonight he couldn't stop. He didn't even want to. Heaven help him if someday he lost touch enough to stop believing his eyes and his heart and start listening to the things people said._ But they don't see what I see, _he thought, wishing he could skirt his fingers across the water as his arms hung down._ They don't see their souls detach, proving that the transcendental exists. They don't __see __your __feelings__, feel your heartbeat, hear your __voice.__ They don't . . . see our father through your eyes, not aged a day from that photograph we no longer have. . . ._

The young man groaned, and rolled his head on his arm.

_No, _he prayed._ It would explain why he never came back. He went off to do some forbidden work and the Gate took him, too._ _Took him to where ever it takes them, where Ed now is, too. It would explain the books in his library. The fact that we were so good at alchemy, everything. . . ._

_ But what can I give in equivalent exchange to bring back both my brother __and__ my father? There is nothing, nothing in this world, that is more valuable to me than them._

Al shook his head and reached into his coat. Leaning against the railing, he pulled out the flask warming by his hip and unscrewed the cap in one flicked spin. He threw back a deep drink, until he had slid down into the snow. His arms between his knees, he looked to the sky and the falling snow, chasing after the every-increasing glimmering specks of light as if one would bring him comfort. Around him, there were no cars and even less people; the factories continued to put out smoke in a way that could only be seen and never heard; the lights flickered in their lamps and not until morning would someone be by to put them out. In the quiet solemn he was left with, he tried not to imagine what his mother would say.

After a while, he stared at the warm steel in his hand, loosely moving it end over end. _ Just once, I would like to forget. To forget that some days I wake only so that I can run down into dreaming again; to forget that one day, I'll probably _want_ to give up and move on, and I'll have to accept the fact that I was the one that killed you; to forget, that as I see the graves I'll have to accept that I'm the only survivor in my family._

_ And that we had it all, and lost it, for good._

The wind burned his lips, and quickly, he licked over the salt pooling there. "Just once, Ed, look at a goddamned _map _while I see through your eyes, so that I can find out where the hell you are, and bring you _back. . . ."_

Al's shoulders shook; he ran his hand over his face, wiping tracts of water and dirt away from his eyes. He took another quick drink, just for the hell of it. It warmed his stomach immediately, and though he couldn't say it tasted the best, it did make him feel lighter, where it pushed out reality. He clunked his head back against the railing, and stared up at the snow drifting down in clumps from the heavens.

"Happy New Year," he said, and threw back the rest.

_Dear brother._

_ If I were to fall into endless sleep, would I dream constantly of you?_

_

* * *

  
_

Ed stared through the back of dark buildings to a little slice of the river he could see beyond them, just one street lamp standing sentinel on the part of the bridge visible, a gentle orange halo and a dark emptiness characterizing the wide, slow-moving slip of river lying under the bridge. Ed rubbed his arms as a he leaned against the laboratory's back alley wall, breathing out a plume of icy air. His head against the bricks, he listened to the sounds of the night. It reminded him of wandering Central on his many return trips there, all alone, trying to escape the realities that he had ever following him. In those alleys, there were no expectations, there were no troubles, there were people that never looked you in the eye. There was but despair, and a hope in continuing to move.

Central smelled like this place—cold, damp, bricks and dirt. Not sand and clear are like the desert, not living things and earth like the East. It was comforting, though, ,in a way—it felt like home. Like he could go back to HQ any moment and Mustang would be there. Hawkeye, Havoc, Breda and Falman would be working hard on the case keeping them up; Fuery would be in a corner trying not to fall asleep over endless communiques he had to cipher out. Hughes might even be there, in his memories, bitching about not being able to go home, but working all the harder because of it.

And Black Hiyate might be hanging out with Al, going for on the grounds. Ed would watch him from the windows, and the frost on the glass would him inspiration for a transmutation array. . . .

He would not have thought about his father. Who then, like now, was still gone.

Ed shifted and reached for his watch. It was not the military that had been so familiar in his hand. The watch that had become the symbol of everything hidden from him.

It was not a watch his father would be giving him for some milestone in his life.

It was merely one he had picked up out of the trash and fixed up himself.

Well, after he spent almost a year dying and Hohenheim had found him.

He had thought it was a blessing back then, and he had clung to it. How things had changed.

Ed flipped open the watch lid and stared at the face. Or really: how they hadn't changed.

The clock was ticking. It was hard to read; his mind saw the circle, saw the arms and gears and started thinking in geometric inlays for arrays. It was impossible to tell what time it was, and in the end, it didn't matter. He had to get back to work.

He sighed, and shifted on his feet. On New Year's past, there would be a celebration. A party, even meager. He looked down for a second, switching the weight on his legs before stuffing his hands in his armpits and leaning back against the wall, his hair sticking uncomfortably to the sharp catches in the bricks. But he stayed there, horizontally splayed, watching the grooves, the slick grime, the grimy river beyond. Memories of so many times doing this in some strange city with his red coat came back, too innumerable to catch any specific one.

The stars, too, were there, then. Some were even the same as the ones here, it seemed. Indeed, some tenacious ones peaking through grey clouds above him currently. The way they passed made him wonder if it was midnight, yet.

It was New Year's still, wasn't it? They used to celebrate it in Risembool by most of the town gathering at someone's house, drinking, taking a run through the countryside, and then drinking some more, before determining that they needed to crash at the nearest house. In his case, being a kid, he would start out with the other kids and by the end of the night he and Al, and sometimes Winry, would end up near the caves overlooking the town and countryside that was their careful homeland, considering the stars with wonder. They would talk about the year. They would not talk at all, sometimes.

Al and Winry would wonder if their parents were up there, somewhere.

There was a little ache in his chest, a niggling need. No matter how much too small Risembool was for his ambitions, he always wanted to go back on nights like this.

_ And here I am, wondering which one of us is alive up there._

He closed his eyes and let his flesh arm fall against the bricks. He held it there, rocking back and forth, just to feel the cold, the finite, the sensation.

"What are you doing right now, Al? You are alive, aren't you? You still exist, outside the Gate? You still exist, _at all? _You're not still in the Gate; you haven't . . . ."

. . . Joined mom in nothingness?

. . . And maybe Dad?

There was another jolt in his chest, more painful. Insistant, even, though with effort he chased it away. It left him a little light-headed; as he sagged against the bricks, he cursed his near-empty stomach. His automail, less intensive but also less efficient than before, wasn't having this lack of food thing.

Even so, the little feeling persisted. It felt like a shadow over his head.

_I almost feel you, sometimes, you know? Like you're standing right here with me._

He chuckled, nervously, but glad of the release. He didn't know if that meant Alphonse was a spirit without a body, following after him without recourse, or that he, Ed, was just going nuts—that he was so desperate for love and caring, an end to his crippling loneliness, that he was seeing things over his shoulder, wishing it into existence.

He sighed, groaning and rubbing his forehead against the bricks. A few memories of the two of them flittered by, even though he would think that the cold would make it harder. Actually, he was rather warm, because of how his metabolism was making him shake.

Slightly, he felt that little twitching feeling over the edge of his shoulder again. It bit into the back of his brain, but didn't tell him anything. Just a . . . feeling, that made him think Al was calling out "brother" to him.

The sound changed, sometimes. Usually it was "Edward, Ed," or "brother," though occasionally it would be a sentiment, as well. It usually only happened, though, when it was a feeling on the same wavelength of his own current thoughts. It could amplify or change his own emotion to some degree, with the whispers that came along with the feelings.

He had no idea what it was.

He crouched down and shivered, one thumb smoothing over the his watch's case, over and over.

He could see that it was the illusions of a desperate mind. He'd been crazy enough for a long while; anything was possible.

His breath plumed, and even something as little as that reminded him of what an odd place he was living in. Was it real? Was he here? he wondered, mind calculating hundreds of possibilities against the view of close walls disappearing into black shadows farther down the leading line. Or was this a place that dead souls went before they were deconstructed in conservation of matter, a place where they happened to pick up any discarded scientific theory that took their fancy that had ever been thought of, and tried to prove it as something to do, before they realized they were dead?

He closed his eyes and bowed his head, smiling at the ridiculousness of it, at how he could neither prove nor disprove it. All there was that could be certain was "I think, therefore I am."

Though the Gate could be deceiving him into thinking he wasn't inside of it. Unlikely, but true.

Either way, there had be a way _out_.

The fact that their worlds were so different in evolution and principle was confusing, but the shock of the different people running around that mirrored his own was disorienting. It had taken him a long time to realize that the fact that they were different was the difference between some dream he'd make in the Gate and a scientific reality: If it was of his making, everyone would look exactly the same: Al, Havoc, Dorchette, have similar backgrounds. They didn't.

Ed sucked in a breath of hard, twenty-degree air, and pressed his head into the bricks, hoping he could get his head around things again. The Pinako here had been the head matron in the government hospital ward he'd spent so many months in, trying not to die of disease. She had never had children; there was no Winry that belonged to her. Oddly enough, she and Hoenheim were still friends.

The same could not be said for himself and some of the others.

He had to face it: he was in another world. He had never thought of it, even as a child, and so it weirded him out. He didn't understand how conservation of matter could work, having transported him here. But he was here. Things were real.

Ed frowned; he ran his hand down the bricks, forcing his brain to realize what he knew to be the truth: reality. Reality. God _damn _it, if he didn't get his head back above water, he just might drown here, and never make it home.

_ Why couldn't. He make. It home?! Why couldn't. The circles. Work?! There was no damn reason, _no damn reason!_, that it would work there and not here. _Yes it could be a binary universe where every important rule was just backwards, the switch on and switch off, but the fact that the Gate could open and _let _him here, the fact that he had traversed back and forth already, made him know there was _something _he should be able to do. There was _something_. He would not accept that there was no way. His father had accepted it, but that was because he thought that there was nothing for him to go back to, screw Ed and Al and the entire world waiting for him back home.

"Edward." Behind him, the door swung open, and Alfons Heiderich, the pale, tall, light-haired counterpart of his brother leaned out from the light that spilled into his space. The youth opened his mouth and then shut it, tipping his head in thought as he saw the deep, concentrating frown on Ed's face, and the fact that he still had half his body against the bricks, stomach first.

Without a word, Alfons stepped around the door and, shutting it behind him, leaned his back against it.

Ed didn't mourn the loss of the intrusive light—he liked the quiet dark sometimes—but he did miss the light it would have brought to Alfons's face. He frowned even harder as his coworker turned to him.

"Edward, what are you thinking about so hard out here?" He played a quick smile across his face, and hoped Ed wouldn't see through it. He hoped Edward would say something that didn't make him drop it.

Alfons was a person who worked differently in many different situations: sometimes he was the leader, sometimes he was the young guy looked after by the others. But with Edward, he seemed to be everything at once.

It was discomforting. He liked Edward, yes, he was a good colleague, and a bit easy on the eyes, but he crashed hard into fits of depression, and absolutely _unstable _views of reality.

Alfons knew damn well Edward never smoked on his smoke breaks, and he was doing more than just trying to clear his head for formulas. With the stories Ed brought up in his free time, Alfons guessed his friend was shell-shocked to some degree, and when his father had left him—or whatever had actually happened—it had thrown Edward off the deep end.

That was obvious at least: Alfons had been the one that found him when he didn't come in to work for so long, balled up in the soon-to-not-be-his-father's apartment, rocking slightly against the walls. Ed had told him some strange things in his desperate panic that night, and the fact that Ed wouldn't let him go was the only reason he hadn't made it to call the looney bin. Yes, Edward was his friend, a very good friend, but Jesus, he didn't know how to help him and he had no obligation to someone that was crazy, especially not when Al was running out of time as he was. There was also to be considered that Edward's friendship apparently came only because he thought that Alfons was some suspiciously-missing brother of his.

Truth be told, he was more than a little bit afraid that someday Ed might snap and hurt them.

Alfons shook his head when Edward just shrugged and muttered something; he took his friend by the shoulder as he turned away, and forced him to sit on his heels with him on the stoop. Ed eyed his hand like it was something dangerous.

"Ah, sorry. Forgot." Al put his hands in the air, trying his best to be amicable. Edward did not like to be touched. It wasn't like it was the norm here in Germany either, to be touchie-feelie like a woman, but it was a worrisome quirk of his, the way he thought he might die if someone touched him, _at all._

"Edward, are you all right? Remember what you promised me?"

The blond frowned, annoyed, and gripped Alfons's wrist tightly. "I am fine, Al. Really. If only you could see into my head; your doubt causes more trouble than it helps. In fact. . . ." He took Alfons by one shoulder, and while Al readied his hands defensively, he didn't protest yet. "I never should have made you that promise—I can't keep it. I can't let you take away from me the only thing that lets me know I'm alive." _Let you take away my memories_.

Ed reached out his hand to the side of Al's face, and for a long time, just watched him, looking over his smooth, pale, _familiar _features. Al wondered if Ed used it as a stabilizing tool, right before he thought that he couldn't take much more of Edward and should ship him off to the Bin as soon as possible.

Ed's face suddenly turned fierce again, demanding. "We all have things we have to deal with in this life, Alfons; don't pretend like I don't realize what that cough is."

Al's eyes popped open. "Are you . . . _threatening _me, Edward?"

"No, Al. I'm trying to tell you something. None of us know when our last day is, and I'm just trying to get home before that happens."

Al sucked in a short breath and sighed, brow tight with worry. "I don't trust you, Edward. I don't think you're safe. You need to know that." He sounded bitter, angry.

"Are you telling me to move out?" He said it, but barely.

Al was about to say something, but then a light seemed to dawn on him, and his face suddenly brightened.

"Would you?" he asked, hopefully.

Ed gaped, and physically drooped backward. He put his face in his hand, and shook his head back and forth.

"Where would I go, Al? Where would I go? You know what, no. I won't. And you know what, if you sell me out, I'll do the same to you. Betrayers deserve as much. You know for a fact that's it's almost impossible to prove a negative. I can't prove to you I'm not a danger, that I'm not crazy, if you refuse to ever believe me. I'll tell you the truth, and if you don't believe me I don't know how you can expect me to trust you, too."

While Alfons said nothing, not sure how to proceed, Ed stood up, aggravated, and went back in the door. "Thanks for letting my know my break's up," he said, slamming the door.

"Wait, Edward, wait!" Al said suddenly, jumping after him. He managed to grab Ed's left wrist, and pulled him to a halt with it.

Ed looked down at his hand, but quickly spat as he pulled it away, "What, Al. What do you want?" He looked ready to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"The guys are all gonna go out. It's New Year's. Don't work yourself . . . to death tonight, okay? Take a break, do something nice for yourself. . . ."

"Go do something that gets me permanently out of your hair?" he sneered. "Look, just—"

"No!" Al cried, annoyed. "Look. The guys invited you out drinking with them tonight and I don't want to be accused of not telling you."

A range of emotions flirted across Ed's face, from surprise, to petulance, to anger, and everything in between. He straightened up, and ran his hand over the back of his hair. "Well, tell them thanks, but you know I can't."

"You want me to tell them yet that you're sickly?"

Ed glared. "I'm not sickly, it's called having a _weak immune system._" To this world, anyway—he was exceedingly healthy before. In a flash, he wondered if his father had caught something virulent that had done him in before he could come home, and he had died in the street somewhere. The Spanish Flu was still going around.

Ed gulped, and tried to put it out of his mind. He wasn't sure he could, and shaken a bit, he continued with very little control,"There is a difference. I am _hardly _weak and _feeble. . . ._"

"Fine. Whatever." Alfons threw up his hands. "I will tell them that."

"Tell them, what?"

Al shook his head. "That you cannot come, because you have work to do."

Ed mirrored Alfons's gesture and turned on his heel at the same time, going for his work belongings. "Fine. You do that. I'm going back."

"Fine," Al nearly shouted back, taking in the sight of Ed, thin and ragged, before spinning on his heel in a huff and going for his own coat. "I'll be out late tonight."

_Take your time, _Ed swore back.

"Happy goddamned New Year," Alfons cursed as he threw the cover over the nearest engine block.

* * *

Al hid his head between his knees and rubbed one hand over the back of his hair. In the other, the flask, empty, jiggled against the inside of his knee. The cold seeped into his legs where he sat in the snow, and even though he could not see his breath with his eyes closed, he could feel it against his nose as the moisture drifted from his mouth.

Brushing back his hood, Alphonse let his head fall back until it clunked against the railing. It roll to the side, cradled better that way, and he found himself staring again at the blackness of the river, the chunks of ice deeper, darker, and slower than an hour ago. They were starting to have the outlines of continents and countries.

He shook his head. It was cold and unwelcoming, until he looked around and found the city lights warmly reflecting on the banks. Something about it . . . ah, right. That was the warm glow of humanity, over there.

Al laughed against the cold, short and bitter. Aren't we just the most pathetic things, humans. Thrown out into the world to destroy the life God gave us.

"Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't do it."

There was a crunch of boots, and suddenly, Al realized there had been feet coming toward him, black military surplus boots kicking through the snow, and now, equally black pants tucked haphazardly into them in front of him.

Al tipped his head back farther to leer at the face accompanying the unshined shoes; against the light there stood a black-haired man in his thirties or forties. Almost completely unremarkable, save for a dark beard.

"And what is it that I wouldn't be doing?" Al asked, slurring only a little, his legs swaying back and forth.

"Whatever it was." The man shrugged.

Al frowned: He felt there should be something he could easily retort to that, but for some reason he was merely more confused. Moving his legs again to keep them warm, he started wondering what he could do to make this man go away: he wasn't who he wanted, so there wasn't much of a reason to speak to him.

Al's eyes drifted back to the dark expanse of river, blank and inviting. "And what if it was something good?"

"Then you should come with me and do something better," the man offered. "Do you remember me?"

Al looked up at him, eyes narrowing in the low light. The streetlight was an orange halo on his face, which was square and a bit unkept; broad shoulders and a loose jacket. . . . Al wondered if maybe he should remember him, but came up with nothing.

"No, I don't," he said, taking the man's offered hand. "I'm sorry, have we met before?"

The man pulled him up and patted him on the back as Al tested how steady he was and dusted off the front of his pants. Even after he felt perfectly stable, the man's heavy hand did not leave.

"You seem too young for this, kid. C'mon, let me buy you a drink and you tell me some stories. I bet you've got a few."

"Yeah, a few," Al shrugged, considering the haze around the edges of his vision. Everything, including his insides, felt soft and fuzzy, and while he knew he wasn't thinking totally straight, he quickly went through his cycle of lies to check if they were still spot-on. He couldn't let his cover be blown by a bout of drinking.

Al looked back at the river just as he found himself moving. "Where are we going, again?" he asked quickly, to the man a head taller than he.

"Just the neighborhood hangout. I wouldn't be a good person if just let my fellow men suffer alone, tonight of all nights." He chuckled at this.

Al's mouth tipped down again, but then he shrugged. He wasn't sure he wanted to go anywhere, and yet, as he walked farther into the bad part of town, he was sure that he wanted to be anywhere but back in his hotel room, back into the content and lifeless room that would chain him back to the suffocating life he had made for himself and could not get out of.

He would take a chance, just this once, because that was what his brother would have done.

Al touched the hand encompassing his shoulder, amazed at the warmth there. "Who are you, again?"

"Capt. Wilson. You sure you don't remember?"

Al shook his head. "There was this accident, actually, so . . ."

As he launched into his well-practiced story, the hand gripped only tighter.

* * *

**A/Ns:** So! That's the first part. I got depressed about not being able to get anywhere in life, so I dug out the story about people depressed about not getting anywhere in life. I suppose I should laugh.

**Informative tidbits!**: This story started out under two premises: Like in the summary, "What if there was a night where they met again, but couldn't remember?" And "What would it be like if Al were a drunk?" Odd combo, I know. I had no idea _this _would occur. I was thinking something much more Tolstoy, just one scene and a bit of a pick-me-up via the human spirit via a philosophy essay in the form of two people positing at each other. Instead, we got this. (Both are evil, evil genius-bunnies.)

+Also, this explores several queries as to what it was like for Ed/Al in their new circumstances--Al's experiences impersonating Ed and why, Al having a more realistic range of emotion, including hard negatives like his brother; Ed dealing with the crippling effects of disease, economic depression, emotional depression, and loss of self in the other world; Alfons being someone he has to win over (life isn't so rosy).

+Lol, Ed and Alfons are super dysfunctional. Things are at their breaking point and they aren't friends. Do you think Alfons's portrayal is believable? He is much more gritty in this than most that make him as pleasant as Al in the series (and, granted, as pleasant as he is at times in the movie). I will deal with that transition eventually. However, for this, I see Alfons as someone that just can't quite bring himself to deal with Ed, nor know how, all his previous attempts failing, so he treats him a bit like a child, though he's nice enough that he feels obligated to keep him around. Like the rest of this fic, nothing is for certain....

+Please review, I really, _really _want to hear your responses. It will also give me desire to finish. :)

+If you like _Memorial_, I'm thinking you'll like this. I think it's thicker to read as far as content, but more consistent. ^___^

* * *

**NEXT CHAPTER**: Al encounters _friendly _ladies of the night with his new friend. (Not to miss!)


	2. Chapter 2

Winter's Eve: Chapter 2

(Beta assistance by Hoenheim-of-Light51)

* * *

"Al's." Al had to laugh at that, as he was ushered in under the blinking red-neon sign.

"Don't worry, Vinnie, he's with me," his new friend said. It had only been a fifteen-minute walk, and now he was half dry, warm, and within seconds was at a table for eight, a beer larger than his head in his hand.

Wilson saw him looking at it, and patted him on the back. "This is where the real men come to drink," he said in response. Al nodded numbly, wondering if that much alcohol could overwhelm his liver.

He was still staring dubiously at the contents of the frothy mug when Wilson returned, his own drink in hand. It was larger still and accompanied by a buxom woman.

"Is it really all right to drink all this? I can pay for it—" _Probably,_ he thought, hand straying to his pocket. It seemed to take a long time, and his fingers' feedback was muted.

Wilson's smile was wide. He shook his head. "No, no really, it's quite all right." His fist came down on the deep groves scoured into the dark, wooden table, and Al wondered at the sound it made. It was reverberative, like the man's voice.

"Are you sure you're all right, kid? You seem really out of it already. How much did you have out on that bridge?"

Al shook his head, wincing at the way "that bridge" would sound to anyone overhearing the conversation.

"I just wanted to get away from it all," he sighed. Great, that made it sound better. He pulled out his flask and jiggled it, measuring the amount left. "Erm, most of it, I guess?"

He kept it around mostly for if he happened to break a bone or get roughed up in an unexpected fight—buzz him enough to get himself to the nearest help, or to sanitize a wound—but it was starting to become handier and handier these days.

As he considered it, Wilson reached over and plucked it from his fingers. "Whatcha got in here, anyway? Something good on the state's budget?"

Al gaped after his disappearing property as the man sampled the smell, and then poured the remaining contents into his mug. He tried to say something to defend himself, but quickly realized there was no use for it. This was the man's territory, and anyway . . . Al's eyes slid over to his beer. He could get good and drunk off this, his New Year's gift from a total stranger. He pulled it close, readying a taste.

It was just what he had wanted after all, wasn't it? To drink himself into a blackout and for a night forget who the hell he was?

_No. _He narrowed his eyes into the amber lens, distorting the world beyond it into unrecognizability. _What I want more than anything is to _hear _you; to have your hand touch mine, and know that you've forgiven me._

Al closed his eyes and shook his head against a hot, staccato breath breaking up in his chest; he bit back a keen from deep in his throat and hid his arms over it, knocking his forehead into the tabletop. For a moment, he got a flash of what it must be like for Ed to do such a thing—feeling the cold, hard metal pieces of his right arm scrape across his skull, catching strands of his hair; hearing the pieces squeak and click on top of each other as they moved; the sound and weight when his metal elbow would hit the table. How could Ed have done that, removed his arm for him, and gotten _metal _instead. . . .

_ My brother was half metal, _he thought in horror, shuddering. _He was half _human_._

And yet when he imagined Ed standing next to him at a table like this, come up behind him over the wood floors with mismatched steps, the hand his brother put on his head and that gently kneaded over his scalp was flesh. Warm and kind, never assuming. The hand of wisdom, his selfless protector. Ed would hurt for him, he would _kill _pieces of himself for him, just to make sure Al would be the better for it, the one who survived unscathed.

His brother was strong. His brother was a fool.

And he was . . . ?

He wasn't sure. His brother had always protected him from the time their mother died; Al did not know at the time how much or why, or the burden Ed carried from their missing father. While it was a sadness to Al—the man and life they could have had, a question—to Ed it was a betrayal, and pure, burning hate that _ate _him.

Was it really any wonder, Al thought, that his brother had eventually fallen. . . .

Al looked out from under his arms toward his own feet, and the empty floorboard space where he imagined Ed's left one—his metal one—would have been in his reverie, standing next to him and smoothly joking with the guys gathered around them.

It wasn't like he hadn't been sympathetic to Ed's plight. He knew what the automail did to him, how unfortunate it was. He tried to alleviate the effects when at all possible. But being unable to feel, he had quickly become unable to recognize how much of a _sacrifice_ it was.

Feeling, it was like _breathing _now—absolutely necessary and oh so sweet, every last tiny bit of it, when he tuned into it. He would kill to defend it now, he had the feeling. . . . And Ed. Ed was still missing half of it. Had given it up _on purpose_. And he didn't even know where he was.

_How could I look at him still half himself and be fine with my full flesh?_

_What kind of person could I have been to let Edward live like that, and then let him _disappear _somewhere. . . . _ _What could have_ _happened_?

"_Fuck it_, I'm a terrible person," he seethed, going for the mug and taking a healthy drag, forgetting to test it first. His throat burned, but not much. Not nearly enough for what he deserved. Even the way the world suddenly spun wasn't nearly uncomfortable enough. Al glared at it, angry that he couldn't even punish himself right.

He hadn't really _let _Ed be a sacrifice, had he?

Across the table, Wilson raised an eyebrow at the sudden vehemence. "Why?"

Al swore again, and drinking more was his only answer. What could he say? It was all lies, his entire life.

"Well then," Wilson said, bending back in his chair and motioning to someone across the room as he took a swig, "drink yourself away, my little friend. Don't forget to enjoy the company though. You never know when it might be your last night on Earth."

By the time he looked up to retort, the man was looking away, toward a cluster of overly-thin, fur-covered women with elaborate up-dos and heavy makeup, coming at them.

Forgetting his previous train of thought, Al's cheeks, ears, and part of his neck brightened vibrantly as three of the women of the night swarmed over him; their coats pressed into his head.

"Oh look, he's so cute, Wil! Where did you get him?" the redhead to his right asked, as she stroked over his ear.

Al tried to put down the resulting shiver that went straight to his crotch, forcing himself to stare at the table. By this point, he was sure they could see his blushing despite the low—_very low!_—orange-ish light in the place, but he certainly did not need _worse _tells of his innocence.

The woman to his left, a brunette, pulled his head out of her colleague's hand and laid a wet kiss against his cheek. Al squeaked, and she found his terror particularly adorable: Not only did she mention it as such to the crowd pulling up more worn chairs to the table, but she molded herself around him and he found himself suddenly in a mound of warmth, fuzz, perfume, smoke, and soft female parts. He giggled.

"So, how old are you, sugar?" she asked, sliding down onto his knee and pulling his mouth towards hers. "Look, or touch?"

Al was suddenly warmer than he thought he could be, and it inflamed more than his cheeks and ears. The hand of the woman's _not _holding the back of his head brushed over his cheek, and he found his eyes trailing the movement of her lips as she spoke. "So smooth, clean. A girl could really get used to that. . . ."

"Y–you think so?" he asked, his voice squeaking a bit as he did so. Automatically, his hand came around her waist to help hold her up, and suddenly he wondered if that was the right move; it certainly made him _feel _manly and powerful, and she seemed to rock into his arms. There was a little zing of pleasure down his back and into his hips; his brain told him that he liked the way it felt to have soft skin depress under his fingers, as they curled, one by one, around her side. It was utterly enthralling.

Across the table, Wilson laughed, devious but hearty. "Yeah, how old are you now, Fullmetal?"

Al stopped, drawing back and facing him, using the woman as a counterbalance. The fact that she still had a warm, slender hand on his shoulder split his attention, but a cold brick of ice had dropped into the middle of his stomach.

_Right,_ he thought, quickly, searching over the grooves in the table._ You're Fullmetal, er, ex-Fullmetal. Ed. Think Ed. How would he react to that—hormones, yes . . . boisterousness, as always. That was always the answer he gave: testosterone_.

"I'm seventeen," he said, as though it weren't to be questioned. At least, his understanding of what that sounded like. "Almost eighteen."

"Fullmetal?" one of the girls by Wilson said. "_The_ Fullmetal? Hero of the People home-born in the East here?"

Wilson tipped his head. "_The_ very one."

She turned her pale face with burning crimson lips toward him, both excited and predatory, and it made Al squirm. Reflexively, he clutched the thing in his hands tighter, and the way it—she—straightened up in response completely redirected his attention. He started a little, his face turning bright red, as the brunette woman in his lap looked toward her redhead friend, behind him. He would have to say that his eyes went considerably elsewhere while she did so, undeniably southward on her . . . on himself. . . .

"Burnadette," the redhead pouted from across the table, "you can't steal him all night, I'll want some too."

The woman on his lap shook her head in response, and redirected Al's face into hers with both hands. Suddenly, Al's lips were pressed up again something—by the alchemic stars, was this her _mouth_?! He realized her nose was the feeling against his cheek, but the rest was ever so warm and wonderful and caused sparks behind his eyes, in his fingertips and his toes. He closed his eyes and pushed back, and oh dear God her mouth _undulated._

She pulled back eventually with a sharp breath, and Al did the same. Their eyes locked for a second, and then Al found himself staring into space at her, the orange lamps reflecting in the dark pool of her eyes, her jewelry. His eyes wide, she smoothed over the back of his head and pulled up farther on his lap with a laugh.

"Just in case you steal him from me," she said, looking toward the red-head with a wink.

Al squeaked in reflexive horror when he remembered they were not alone, and pushed his legs tighter together for dear life.

She bent her head back down and directly into Alphonse's mouth, one last time. Al would have been lost in all of it, but now he was just scared out of his mind. Even though this second kiss returned warmth and flurry to his stomach, he was aware enough about the current setting, the fact that he didn't know what to do, and that it could be his brother here, that he just felt sick.

Feeling a great need for his beer, Al gave her what he assumed to be a costomary return peck after they parted (he wasn't sure how this worked outside of dime novels, but he assumed reciprocating usually made people happier), which ended up being right at her neck because she had just straightened up.

Not that it was bad either, there was definitely something interesting about the neck that he had never realized until just now. But it wasn't exactly what he was aiming for. She giggled and patted him on the head, then went back to her conversation. It was musical.

Burnadette slid into the seat next to him, and he watched her go. It must have taken him an entire minute to stop watching her chatter, her movements to and fro, the slide of her hair over her slender, fur-covered shoulder.

The door opened across the room, and a blast of frozen air hit everyone. Suddenly functioning again, Al moved his chair closer to the table to hide his lower half and then he all but dove for the alcohol. As his lap cooled painfully, he downed a bit more than he should have and it did nothing to fix the urge to squeeze his legs together under the table.

But thinking that his first kiss had just come from such a nice hooker (and a first half-kiss _from _him_, _as well), he wasn't sure he wanted to think much more about his brother, his life, or anything.

Though, well, that neck he certainly wanted to explore more—

He shook his head out violently to clear the rush, and then forced his cheek on his fist. He found Wilson at the other end of his gaze, and decided to stare at him, unblinking, a _man, _a rather hairy, broad, old-ish man.

"Quite the party, yes indeed," he offered, only having to half–force his drunken smile. He was probably slurring; he couldn't really tell. A hand came on his thigh and rubbed, and the beginning of his next sentence was startlingly high-pitched. "You really do know me, though, if you know my name too!" He glanced back at the owner of the hand to try and do something about it, but he realized after a few seconds that all he was doing was shaking, and all she was doing was fixing him with an amused, come-hither smile while she draped her cheek on her fist. And this wasn't Burnadette. This was a blond, on his _other _side. Confused, he shook his head and turned back to his host. "How was it, you said we knew each other?"

The women assembled turned to Wilson, making murmurs of approval and wondrous query in the dim bar light. The man raised his eyes, and then guffawed, throwing his head back.

"Right. Right. It wasn't much. We just met in the business, once, a few times over the course of a job."

Al nodded, considering in his haze. The hand on his leg had withdrawn for a moment, and he almost gasped in relief. He pulled back another gulp, and then scowled over the mug when it was set back down. The man's answer was annoyingly vague, but he didn't care. What did convention tell him to say to keep up conversation with that vague answer and a woman's hand down his leg?—but the guy _did_ know who he was, and was giving him free things. Al assumed he himself was drunk, so, whatever. Even if the man was making sense, he probably wouldn't get it.

"He doesn't remember you," the redhead said, amused, brushing up next to Wilson.

"Well, we were both quite busy men in our day." He tossed his head. "Also, you said there was a little . . ._ accident?"_

Immediately, there were eight sets of eyes on him, and when Al looked to the side, he realized _everyone else _in the room was listening in as well.

He coughed, and straightened up a little, running his hand through his hair. Strange, he thought, that doing so made him want to topple over.

"Yes, yes, there was," he began with a breath. "It's not that I don't like your friend here; there was a transmutation that went awry a while back, and I . . . I lost my memory of the entire time I was a State Alchemist, and some before," he said with practiced ease. As usual, though, the air of disinterest did not come through like he desired.

"That's horrible!" the women gasped, and Wilson nodded appreciatively. _"How?"_

Al sighed, feeling only a _small _pang at lying this time; he felt worse about the fact that large chunks of the story were true. "Transmutation, it requires energy. Energy from the soul, the body, and the mind." He pointed to each, overshooting them only a little. "But, if you mess something up—get a line wrong here or there, a theory, get distracted or interrupted—it goes awry on you.

"On the easy end, it can simply fail and fizzle out. But when you're doing something big—_serious—_it could melt your _mind, _explode whatever you're transforming, or devour your body's molecules entirely. . . ." He started gesticulating faster, and it was too easy to make them big. He sighed, and shook his head when he realized he was doing it. He ended up resting his head against his fist and running his hand idly around the dew on the slightly glowing mug. "And now I don't know anyone, remember anything from the time. . . . I'm lucky to be alive, I suppose, but it's no way to live, you know?"

_God, I sound like I'm washed up and forty_. His stomach was starting to hurt, even though the rest of his insides were burning. _And think, I could be home right now, with Ed, going to public school and having a perfect New Year's dinner with him, Pinako, Winry, if we hadn't. . . . If I hadn't . . . _lost _him—_

Wilson took a large quaff in sympathy, his smile growing as well. Still, he made sure to seem appropriately horrified. "Wow, that's rough, kid. But it's not like you've forgotten everything about yourself, right? You've still got somewhere to start from, at least. . . . Family?"

Al shook his head, waving his hand. "My mother died when I was 6. I never knew my father, or the rest of my extended family. We lived in the country, by ourselves. One neighbor."

His heart thrummed inside his chest, when he remembered the look on Winry's face when he'd left her, Granny Pinako. Why did it have to be done, leaving one part of his family for the other?

He ran his hand over his mouth, and looked to the side. "And I forgot where I left my brother."

_"Forgot?_" Wilson asked. "Damn."

Al nodded, and Burnadette's hand patted his, laid out and forgotten on the table. Since he could, he flipped the position, capturing the hand and rubbing the fingers, wishing it was his mother's, or Winry's. He did not look at her, but instead, the brick wall somewhere off to the side, searching his memories. It was tough to wade through the emotional baggage he'd been assaulting himself with for the past few days, along with alcohol, to get back to the straight facts. But as Granny Pinako would say, as much as you'd like to, disillusioning yourself wasn't going to help anything. She would kick his ass for this. "I can't remember where he is," he mumbled. "I haven't seen him since that day. . . . I think?"

Wilson tipped his head. "The big armored guy?"

Al smiled, but found himself suddenly blinking back tears. He re-clasped his hands around his drought, and bit his lip as the gentle warmth bled from his fingers. ". . . Yeah. _Him. . . ._" He rubbed his fingers through his gloves. "Only he's not in armor anymore, so no one knows what he looks like."

Under the gazes from around the table and elsewhere, Al rubbed his ear, and then ran his hand through is hair, his elbow set heavily on the table. _Please don't ask any questions._

Wilson leaned in; he seemed rapt enough. "Wouldn't it be good to stay in one place, so that he can come and find you? Go home—won't he look for you there?"

"If only it were that simple," Al whispered. "There is no home."

They stared at him. "What?" Wilson asked.

"I can't trust him to come find me—I don't know if he _can_," Al continued, taking it as a cue. "I don't know if he's even _alive_, and all this _time_.. . ." He ran his gloved hands over his face, over the sudden water there; up through his hair; and he forced himself to take a breath. Several large, _cold _ones.

"I shouldn't be bothering you with this, though. . . ," he said when he came back up. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

He looked around at the women, in their rainbow lipstick colors, and they all stared back at him, as if it were an unacceptable answer. "That's rough," Wilson answered into the silence eventually.

And then, suddenly, it was asked by no one in particular, "Can you not remember because of Lior?"

It wasn't said to fight, just a simple question. It didn't seem smug or upset—but there was a tension, suddenly. A bit too wide-eyed of a stare, that settled around the entirety of those still listening. Like wanting to watch a train wreck. This was East City: they knew they could have been next, and they wanted to know who to blame for those that were lost.

He had learned of the event, some months after first being pulled out of the underground, by the papers and the radio; it would have been impossible not to hear of it, even after the month of semi-consciousness he had spent in absolute emaciation and, later, in special gear made by Pinako and Winry to block out his senses during the period it took to readjust them. What he learned in the aftermath he would have called insanity if not for the proof of his own body.

Ed was linked inextricably with the uprising in the articles and newscast transcripts—was he involved or wasn't he, why had he run or not. However, it was only during a certain period—mention of Ed along with the event hadn't occurred until about a week or so after it first hit the radio, and after the government upheaval had exploded just a few weeks later, the dirt-slinging against Ed suddenly disappeared. However, he was technically out for a court-martial by the old military for desertion, and wanted for questioning in relation to the upheaval by the new. . . . The trail stopped there, as he couldn't find anyone in the military that knew anything about his brother's whereabouts at the time, partially because, even two years later, everyone was extremely closed-lipped about the coup. Also, he couldn't get near the military bases to find out who his brother's commanders had been and where they were now, without risk of not coming back, himself. They would ask hard questions he couldn't dance around. The truth might get him killed or disappeared. A lie wouldn't get him his answers, and probably thrown in jail at best. No one would tell him about Ed's life in the military. Maybe Ed hadn't really talked about it. Winry admitted he rarely wrote home, though the idea that _he_ himself hadn't was rather . . . disheartening. Possibly, he couldn't hold a pen in the armor.

Possibly. He closed his eyes and he thought he could see the hands moving. But the image never completely formulated. Imagination or memory, he could never tell. It wasn't like his muscles could remember it.

Still, there had to be records, somewhere, even if, as he suspected, his family was hiding them from him. The Alchemical Incident at Lior was one of the first things he had discovered and used to trace his brother; from hours at papers archives even when he could barely deal with the sensations of breathing and touch, he'd gotten most of the hard hits of their journey, and Winry would report back to him if the stories were accurate based what they'd told her.

It had quickly become apparent that his brother was a hero, just like she said. And also, everything after Lior was giant speculation. _He's a traitor. He's a deserter. Shocking new evidence released. _He had first liberated the place of its prophet; was this part of the plan? And by a few: _Why the change in the Military's story?_

Someone was probably dead over that story making it to print.

And yet, no mention, anywhere, of the Philosopher's Stone. Which was the only reason for a transmutation that big. Izumi agreed. Izumi knew. Oh, did Izumi know things. She'd told him everything about the homunculi, because, well, Wrath was sitting on his lawn for one, and for another, Dante could still be out there. The labs could still be operating. There was danger, everywhere he looked. Life was not so grand still, despite what the new government had declared. And no relief to his search.

Izumi had not known what circle had been used in Lior, though. So far, no one did. And frankly, it wasn't the end of their road, it wasn't where Ed disappeared, so it was only part of what he needed. Scar died there, he knew that, he had been able to wrangle that out of Rose, who liked to be as clam-up as Winry. They knew what they wanted for him, but it just wasn't what he wanted for Ed.

What he did know was what Ed had told Pinako when he showed up at her house running from a squad. Whirling in one night of rain, hiding in the basement just before the town was _occupied_. There would be hell to pay: people were dead, thousands. The military had killed its own men in droves in order to quell the uprising, to play victim, and, what he couldn't tell anyone: to make a Philosopher's Stone. They wanted him dead because he knew. They wanted him dead, because he could stop them. And in the back of his mind, a tingling little voice whispered, _They wanted him dead because he _had _it._

It was the one thing Pinako had decided to tell him, because she knew it would be the single most likely thing to get him into trouble with mobs. Where the human transmutation done on him several times was priority number one of things to keep from the government, and being the key to Ed's whereabouts was tantamount to not divulge to the army, telling normal people he had nothing to do with Lior would keep him _alive_. She told him why it would follow him. Izumi told him how he'd fight it.

And now, he needed it. An enormous pack of lies he had to storm through, difficult even when stone cold sober.

Frankly, he couldn't remember it, but in his heart, he knew every bit.

"No," he said simply, decisively, to the crowd waiting for his answer. The sharpness made most of them recoil. "It was after that."

They were afraid, he realized suddenly, the idea cutting through the buzz like a brisk breeze.

". . . If you can't remember, how do you know that?" Wilson smiled a little. _Playful_.

Okay, maybe _he _wasn't afraid.

"Convenient, isn't it?" asked another man at the table. Sharp, but not snide.

_He _was.

And it _was _an exceedingly convenient excuse, no doubt. Al himself would have considered it the greatest "easy excuse" possible if it weren't for the fact that there was news of just such memory lapses happening to alchemists every few years. And the fact that something had taken all of his.

Maybe he had given them away—

Al shot the man a black look, which held all of Ed's ire and ferocity but none of the rage. His Elric Stare was much calmer, and, as it turned out, a hell of a lot scarier. "Next time you get used as a patsy, you tell me that." It was not hard to go down this path, the pebble that caused a cascade of boulders. It was not hard to be all of his and Ed's broken dreams, to imagine what Ed was in the moment of Lior he couldn't remember, the horror on his face as the light engulfed an entire city. He saw it in his nightmare, sometimes.

"It could be said," he continued, glaring through that image to each person in turn, slightly blurry but much easier to look in the eye therefore, "that the entire reason the Fuhrer let me _take _the State Alchemist exam was in order to use me for that very event."

The horror was sinking in, just a little. For some reason, he relished informing people that the world wasn't the way they thought it was. At least, when it came to people who had screwed them over. His heart was thrumming a bit too much for it to be a good thing. At the moment, however, he didn't care. His frustration was flowing out and he took it for everything it was worth.

"A young soldier that had the eye of the public." He scoffed, the black look deepening with the sardonic. "They sent me in there to die, and I _didn't_." He looked to Wilson. "You might understand why they don't like it when their dogs don't roll over."

The man smiled back, and raised his glass. "It's always a bug when people don't die as planned."

As he threw one back, Al frowned, and a man to his right took his attention. He had not yet spoken, and he looked a little dazed.

"So . . . you _didn't_.. . . Transmute Lior?"

"We all know the reputation State Alchemists have. Why would I have run if I had done what the State wanted? Why wouldn't I have been lauded, instead?"

"But the soldiers. _Our _soldiers?" It was the first man that had asked a question.

"And the Fuhrer is deposed now, isn't he?" Al held his gaze, holding very still, or at least he thought it was still. "What the papers said about it being a plot of the military's was completely true."

Several people took a breath and stared at the table. A couple grizzled types cursed the military and others chugged back drinks with a scowl. All the women did the table thing, and then glanced at a particular man in the room. Burnadette was trying not to look at _him_, he noticed, and it made his heart leap into his chest and his stomach sink.

However, Wilson seemed rather pleased. "How do you know that?" he asked, just as Al was checking over his shoulder.

"I just do." Al gave him a hard, decided stare, as he turned back. "I would never do that." He wouldn't. Ed wouldn't. And that feeling wouldn't go away. It was a surety he didn't have when he wondered who it was that had let Ed go to whatever fate he now held.

"I threw in my watch that day and haven't gone back." At least, as best he could figure given the accounts. "And the fact that I lose my memory when I need to be defending _myself_, that is what's extremely convenient, and not for me, if you catch my drift. . . ."

"And that's why you're on the lamb, isn't it?" Wilson said, as if speaking for everyone.

The room seemed to warm. Everyone's eyes were on him, but with a yearning, a craving, for something to believe in. So it was _that _kind of crowd. . . .

Al smiled, reaching out over the table as he spoke. He wasn't sure what exactly he was gesturing for, but he didn't knock anything over, at least.

"Something like that. And a whole host of other things I can't begin to understand. What can I say, our paths diverged." It sounded like something his brother would say. "But the case is in a bit of a dead zone, given the new government." He shrugged. It was better to make them think no one wanted to find Ed, and there wasn't much else to say other than, _Don't turn me in, please and thank you._ The threat of using alchemy just didn't deter as many people as it probably should have. Especially drunk, unhappy ones.

No one seemed ready to run for the door, though. "There's no reward, currently, case you're wondering," he added. That should probably do it.

"No worries, no worries, we're all friends here. Sorry 'bout the hard time, just wanna know if you're crazy like the rest of us." Wilson shrugged amicably, over-acting to ease the tension.

"Sometimes I wonder about that." Al grimaced. "I can fix your tools?"

"Not a problem, not a problem, such a celebrity, who really didn't sell out after all."

At that, Al smiled. It was dizzying. "Not at all."

"You just got screwed up the ass by the military, eh."

Al's smile froze, and his eye twitched. "I . . . guess you could say that?"

"Damn military!" Wilson barked for the good of the room.

There was a chorus of assent, all across the room. The prostitutes especially.

And just like that, the place was on his side again. Al sighed and, wondering at it a little, glanced back at Wilson. "So what are you doing now?" the man asked.

"I'm looking for my brother," he answered immediately. The misery in his voice, in his heart, did not reflect the relief he felt at finally being able to tell something verifiable. "My priorities have changed."

. . . Or hadn't. The thought struck him abruptly, that if he was supposed to be Ed looking for Al, it was just the same as before. And he, Al, was still looking for a way to restore Ed. And before, with Izumi, they had been looking for their mother. And even before that, even though it took him years to realize it, they had been looking for their father, every night, out the snowy window against the not oft-traveled road. . . .

He still was, really. _Why _had his father disappeared from the view of Ed's eyes lately—?

Al pressed his hand against his sternum to stifle the ache in his chest. It made it hard to breathe, not unlike the link made to an object during a transmutation. And it persisted, as thought it could suck the life out of him.

There seemed to be a collective _clink _in the smokey hall as everyone else took the pause as an opportunity to drink. When Wilson quaffed down more beer and Al said nothing more, a soft murmur descended over the table, over the room. People went back to talking. A few looks lingered, but eventually moved on. Especially the pitying smile of Burnadette waited.

To save himself the trouble of any further embarrassments with her, Al closed his eyes with a groan and reached for his beer. At the last second he remembered that sighing and intake of liquid did not mix, but made it, smoothly gulping it down. As it went, it wasn't the strongest beer, but honestly, he was still pretty new to drinking and his body was smaller than he thought it should be, and who knew when the last time he had eaten was, so he was quickly getting loopy. And he liked it that way. It felt . . . a little exciting. The tingling of his fingers was new, all over again.

In the back of his mind, he wondered if could manage to remain depressed, even when drunk. It couldn't be possible.

"Well, Damn, get this kid another drink," the redhead said as he placed the now-empty stein on the table, a bit too heavily. She tipped her head brightly at him, despite that she sat on Wilson's leg, her hand primly around her knee. "And something good: We don't get a celebrity like this every day."

"You'll stay with us until midnight, won't you?" asked Burnadette. Her smile was soft, all previous question forgiven. She looked like she wanted to touch him, but was waiting for a cue.

Through a haze of finding it suddenly hard to breathe for completely different reasons than before, a thought wandered into Al's mind. What kind of incidents had she gone through to make her learn to be leery of such a thing?

Weary of touch . . . like it burned. He never wanted to be someone to cause that. He knew what it was like when he had just returned to his hyper-sensitive body—God, that pain—but he hadn't been like that because he had been _afraid. . . . _He laid his hand over his drained beer, his cheek over his hand, and then looked at her. She was younger, probably barely older than him—seventeen or eighteen or so—though she seemed much older. She looked beautiful, her long hair waving over her fur-clad shoulder.

"I don't see why I wouldn't stay," he articulated with his best welcoming smile, making sure to sound compassionate and do his best to get all the syllables. He gestured to Wilson with his stein, and then each group in turn. "A nice guy I'm supposed to remember, pretty ladies"—was it an insult to call them that?—"I'd say I'm pretty blessed tonight."

Even though it would be the best night he could imagine, if just his brother would be there too, he thought suddenly. What a night it would be, to drink at a pub together with his big brother, Ed showing him the ropes, them being a notorious, well-sought-after pair. . . . Al pursed his lips, trying to remember Ed from his recent dreams, rather than as he was the last time he'd seen him in the flesh.

He sighed, unsuccessful, and not even sure he'd be happy if he had been. He rubbed his eyes, and the furs descended back around his body. A sea of coos and caresses, delicate pats and comforts aimed at his youth. The women were able to mother him, and since they rarely got the chance to do so at their leisure, Al let them. It was strange—half courtship and half protection made to soothe his woes, but as he got more and more into the drinks thrown at him, he didn't mind as much, and the women didn't make as much of a distinction between their efforts. It ceased to matter.

At midnight there was a great celebration in the bar, which Al took part in only quietly, nursing the ache in his heart that came when he realized another year was dawning, another year in which his brother could have been there but wouldn't be. Another year without that which he searched for, and another special occasion gone by without his elder sibling in the memory with him.

Soon, another birthday would go by that he would have to pretend was his, all the while its recipient was no longer there.

That might not even be alive.

Oh Mother, he was living a lie. How could he tell that to her grave.

At first, he had only taken Ed's coat as a security thing. It was untold comforts to have it there; untold mysteries of years he hoped he could remember if just stared hard enough at the thing. But, it became useful in identifying Ed to others, because people rarely forgot it and they often confused Al for him. The reception was always better that way, too. It quickly became much easier wear the coat, to pretend to be him, rather than explain why Al _was_ the guy in the armor. How he _should_ have access to the same clearance he did before, as he was always allowed there with Ed. It was easier to _be _Ed than to have to lie about why he was no longer their image of "Al". As ironic as that was.

Wearing Ed's persona, however unlike his own it was, was catching with the coat. It was a bit like a magic spell, alchemy for the soul.

. . . Ha ha. _Ha._

This day really needed to end.

Momentarily, Al wondered what he would put in his journal about the night, before the redhead introduced him to a mix of something including scotch. After that, he ceased to remember a thing.

* * *

Ed stared at the table without seeing in the dark, his hands folded loosely around each other on the worn, scarred wood. He rubbed his flesh thumb over the glove of his prosthetic one nervously, letting it filter in to his heavy heart as white noise.

This new "automail," he had trouble getting used to: he was never quite sure what it was made of, and so his sense of touch was permanently fascinated by it. And now, with his father gone, he may never have any more of them made. . . . He had tried to learn the mechanics of it at the time; he _knew_ the necessity of doing so, but with everything else he had to learn about this world; the long, heavy bouts of fever he had been fighting; and just the fact that his father was even _there_.. . . He hadn't given it enough of his time. Not to mention that, even if he _could _figure it out and get the limbs he had _now _to do the detail work, he had no idea who his father's suppliers were, nor what was available to innovate with. In this country, he wasn't sure he could fake his way out of why he needed the parts. And the money to buy it. . . .

If Hohenheim had been good for one thing, it was that. He was apparently very adaptable to stuffy situations. For what he'd done with alchemy, Ed knew he had to at least be book-smart, but practical application? Social skills? Frankly, he was more than a bit surprised.

And then, Hohenheim had _followed _him here. And found _work_.

Fucking father of the year, right until he'd taken off again.

. . . If he hadn't just finally given it up and died, citing his dear mother as the reason.

Ed shook his head in the blackness, eyes fluttering a little further closed and staying that way. There must have been something about "important" adults that he didn't understand. Or maybe . . . he was just the only one his father couldn't deal with being around.

He took in a long breath, and let out as a sigh. He tipped his head a few degrees, depressed, rejected . . . abandoned. Alone. His chest ached.

At least, if Ed ever saw Alphonse again, he could tell him for certain just what the man was like.

But his father _had_ been willing to do those things for him, for a while. Support him, as well. He could have been considered nice, even, if Ed had bothered acknowledging it. At best, he was dependent and he grudgingly accepted the help. The day after he finally thanked him, a tiny swell of something in his heart, he'd taken off.

Unlike Ed, Hohenheim's body was apparently strong enough that he could hold down a steady job in this world, so with him also went any security.

Behind him, a small, manual-wind clock ticked in the background, a clock Alfons had made for them, scrounged from parts over time. Alfons, always so smart. . . . Always the smart one, Alphonse had been, even if he'd never gotten to show it much.

_If I had not interfered in my brother's life, he would be like you. . . . Confident, capable . . . in a body. With me there, perhaps not so brainwashed as you are, and more able to let his kindness triumph over the ambition which drives you like a need to survive, but . . . you. He would look like you, he would _be_ you. And nothing would make me happier than that._

_ I want to see it. I want to not hold _you _back._

_ I want to make up for my mistakes. I want. . . . To finally be free of this._

The question was if that would come by settling for the Al he had.

There was a little jolt in his chest, heavy, like lead dropping onto his sternum.

_ I can't do this, I can't let you stay in a realm of trouble with me. I'll never be able to protect you._

But he had a feeling. This niggling . . . Feeling, in the back of his mind, that said, _"You need him."_

He slid down onto the table top, head draped over his forearms and not feeling a bit of it.

_And every time I think of your face, Alfons . . ._ _every time I am blessed and tortured to see your face in the flesh, I am reminded of what I could have and at the same time, what I'm searching for. What I have given up; what I have screwed up. I remember why I'm here__**.**_

_ Just seeing you gives me all the hope I need, and destroys it the minute you open your mouth._

Ed wrapped his arms around his head, mismatched as they were. _"I can't take this anymore,_ Alfons."

* * *

"Sorry, Burnadette, Sara," Wilson said to the swooning women trailing after them. He hefted the young alchemist up again; Elric had a penchant to slide against his much larger frame. He was feeling the alcohol himself, but nothing that he couldn't walk from. "If I don't get him home, I'm sure he'll fall asleep right here and now. Sorry, but nothing from him for you tonight."

They made pouting faces and trailed their fingers over the red-coated youth, himself. He kissed his red-head's hand as he made his way out the door. "Thanks ladies. It was a fun night; sorry to disappoint in the end."

"Ahh, well," they twittered almost in unison, but to very different keys. Burnadette seemed highly disappointed, but she gave the little alchemist, right about her height, a little kiss on the forehead as he dangled over Wilson's shoulder. He slurred something appreciative with a pure, drunken smile, gave an uncoordinated salute.

Wilson shifted him on his shoulder. "All right, time to go soldier," he said. "Back to your bed." Al murmured happily, and then they were out the door, into the cold night.

Alphonse chased after his breath plumes with his hand, constantly twittering pleased noises while he did so. "I'z tha way," he said after a while, pointing across the river.

They walked toward the bridge, slowly, Al enjoying his mind being dazzled by the streetlights, the snow, the dancing lights on the water, and the occasional car's headlights. He wondered what would be so great at this wonderful bed they were going to, if the ride there was this awesome. But then, right before the bridge, they changed directions. The man turned them around a corner made of a tall, dark building with few windows, and then before Al knew it, they were in a maze of alleys with no lights, only about one person wide.

Al made a querulous noise after a while, looking over his shoulder toward the river. But the man held his waist tight, and he couldn't come off of his shoulder. He figured there must be a good reason for his inability to leave the thing he was leaning on, and so he did not protest.

Thwarted, Alphonse watched with some sadness the darkly-glinting river disappear between brick walls. When it was gone, he turned back to the man whose shoulder he occupied, and at some point his hand connected to the man's chest, a lethargic pat.

"Where'rr going?" he asked.

"Somewhere I've been keeping _just_ for you," the man said.

"Mmnnn? Good?"

"Let's just say, you'll never leave."

"Hmnn...," Al considered hard, and then shrugged, smiling. "Mnn'kay."

* * *

A/N: Do you remember who Wilson is yet? No? Ahh, I didn't think so. Neither does Al. Poor, poor Al.

Al and hormones. Ha, he's such an awkward, confused sweet pea, blindsided by the Friendly Ladies. I love this chapter so much. I hope you are amused by it, too.

Reviews make me a happy camper~~


	3. Chapter 3

He dusted off the snow on the front step as he dug for his keyring, looking for the one key that actually had anything to do with him. The rest were to the lab; some of them he didn't even know what they did, passed onto him from the last "guy that held the keys." When he finally managed the lock with cold fingers, the heavy sound split through the space, and the creaking door echoed through the black maw that was his apartment.

So Ed's wasn't home, it was so dark, or maybe asleep. Maybe he wasn't going to _come _back, came a little flutter. Maybe his life would be his for good.

And then . . . he would die alone.

Al pushed away the frown and groped for the lamp on the table, then matches that were always in the same place next to it. With practiced ease, he opened the lamp case, lit the match, and ever so cautiously caught the wick.

With a smile, he straightened and let the match burn, warming his fingers. He cupped it carefully and when it reached its end, he flicked it out and went for the lantern door.

All he saw was a hand, closing the lamp. A hand as black as the night.

Alfons darted backward with a screech, slamming into the wall. The hat tree fell over, and in the silence that followed, the German stayed plastered against the wall.

There was a figure leaning over his table, cast in an underglow from the lamp. It was reaching out toward him, its face obscured by the shadow of its arm.

"Stay back!" he yelled, frantically feeling for the doorknob. He had a feeling it wouldn't open even if he tried, this was a specter, something out to finally drag him—

"Hey!" it barked. "It's me. . . ."

Ed's face suddenly lit up as he lowered his hand, bracing against the table. His features were knit with concern, a little bit of confusion, a large amount of hurt. Al cared for none of it.

"What are you _doing _standing there in the_ dark_!" he cried. He held strong for a moment, but then a tickle rose and after seconds of ignoring it he had to cough. The energy drained out of him like water trickling down his back, and the customary cold in his body came right on its heels.

"You don't need light to think," came the voice. It really was Ed's, wasn't it?

And not just some demon impersonating him—

Al turned his head slowly, the rest of him still hunched over. Ridiculous. Demons didn't exist. Ed was capable of being the scariest thing on two legs. He was good at being odd. Other-worldly.

Which . . . he probably practiced, now that Al though about it.

On the other side of the space between them, Ed was sitting sadly, looking apologetic at the lamp. His gold irises glittered, and then he shrugged. "It was just nice, watching you spark the light. I didn't want to interrupt."

As Al tried to puzzle out that statement, Ed's face slowly rose to look at him. And it continued to look at him, without saying a word.

"Edward," Alfons said, straightening up and tossing his head to shake off the jitters. They weren't completely chased away, but hung at his feet like the dust bunnies. Ed tipped his head, considering. Al, in turn, put his hands on his hips. After several breaths that forced his breathing to slow and his coughing to cease, he spoke and tried to sound in charge. "You're still up?"

Ed nodded, slowly. "I was waiting for you," his voice, strangely gentle and reserved, said eventually into the darkness.

"You . . . were?" Alfons frowned, and, placing his bag on the floor, a bit too overtly sidestepping around the table, went for the extra candle in the cupboard. "Look, I'm all for saving money," he said nervously, "but you shouldn't have to just sit here in the dark, all by yourself. . . ."

He forced himself to sound overly cheerful as he dug through the cabinets while looking over his shoulder. Didn't people act really calm right before they attacked, after they had already snapped?

"I've packed up my stuff," Ed said into the abrupt silence.

"You . . . did?" Al asked, hand slipping off the knob. He looked up toward the top of the stairs, twitching like he had half a mind to go up there and check.

Just as he was about to hurry across the room, Ed answered for him: "But I couldn't make myself leave."

Alfons tensed and stared at Ed, his illuminated frame against utter blackness beyond. After calculating his options, and careful to avoid any statements that would seem to approve of Edward's madness—or provoke it—Al set the second candle down and turned on his heel. The worn out cabinet received him with its previous safety and Al almost sighed when he reached it. He looked back over his shoulder immediately; Ed was silently lighting the candle, left-handed though it was.

"So you want to move out. But you couldn't? How come?" he asked, as if he were asking why Ed chose one sock brand over another. He turned back to the fixtures, if a bit stiffly.

"Mm? Hm. . . ." Ed looked up hopefully, only to find Al's back to him, and so returned his attention to the grains in the table. "I wanted to, for your sake, but I realized . . . that I need you."

He paused, and Alfons's motions slowed; as he put down a cup on the counter, he stole a long glance over his shoulder that his blond flat-mate didn't see, so involved was he still in the question.

"I don't think you know how important you are to me, Alfons," he continued, and Al kept staring—he didn't like where this train of thought was going. "I guess you might not want to be, or feel the same even, but you're the only friend I have here. I don't like to admit it, but for the truth . . . if I had to completely distance myself from you, find a place to live alone, I might not make it."

He looked up suddenly, and stared at Al; caught spying on him, Al looked anywhere but Ed and eventually turned completely around.

Ed's eyebrows furrowed at the image of his back. _You are my hope, my brother. That face . . ._

Alfons bit his lip, gently laying his hand over the upside down glass he'd placed on the counter. His eyes searched over the wall at the back of the sink as his fingers jittered.

Alfons shook his head, and took a steadying breath. He had to think about himself now, despite the taste it left in his mouth. He had to look over his own health—no one else would. When there were other people around to fight the battles, he would be the caregiver to all, he liked it that way, but right now. . . . It was a matter of survival. He had to look out for himself, because stretching his lifespan was what was going to do the most good for others in the long run. It would be better for both he and Edward if they didn't destroy each other. He couldn't just keep around something he knew to be poisoning his admittedly fleeting ability to survive, no matter who it was. He'd made up his mind, he had to continue on. Sometimes, you just had to make a break. . . . Wasn't that the right thing, in the end?

"Besides," Edward continued behind him suddenly, "I don't want to leave you without rent so abruptly. That just wouldn't be right."

Alfons ground his teeth, and tried not to put his face in his hands. He was sure there was a hopeful smile in that sentence. _And where would you go, Ed? Crazy or not, I can't just throw a man out in the street in the dead of winter. The only reason you can get in the soup line is because you're not homeless, too._

"You should get a job," Al said finally, coolly, opening the shutters over the sink. Moonlight flooded in, and with the strength the light gave him, he took two cups to the table. "I know I got you in at the university unofficially, but you don't get paid full for that—you're on the expense sheet, not the payroll. We certainly needed you for the formulas—you've been invaluable for that—but you should do yourself a favor and put your talents to better use."

He placed one mug in front of Edward, one on the other side of the table, and then stood next to the man, at the empty third chair in the middle. His voice dropped in pitch, suddenly pained and gentle. "You're a genius, Edward; you should take care of yourself. God loves all his children, but he grants the most help to those who help themselves."

Ed soured, a little bit more noticeable in the moonlight now coming through the fourth-sized window, but thankfully, he kept his typical religion-bashing words to himself. It emboldened Alfons enough that he moved right into his next question.

"How do you come up with the rest of the rent, anyway? What exactly do you do?"

Ed raised an eyebrow at how close Alfons was to him at the moment, completely aware that he was towering over him while trying to appear nonchalant.

Quickly, Alfons backed up a couple of steps, holding up his hands.

"I do what I have to," Ed said, shrugging. He reached for the cup with his left hand and slowly pulled it under the table, as his friend conspicuously moved back in.

"Take care of yourself," Al said again, softly, unhappy. "I wouldn't want you to get hurt."

"I do some tutoring," Ed clarified quickly, though he stared at the wall. "I like it, but it grates on my nerves sometimes, when I have other things to do"—_like finding my way back to te guy that looks like you_—"and there's not a lot of work. I hear the university can barely stay open, as it is."

Thankfully, Alfons nodded and moved off, and Ed felt his need to fidget with the glass lessen. God, he wanted to drink, into oblivion, but doing that was what had made him force Alfons to lock up their liquor (if they ever could afford any). The thought of Al would always sober him up, and better than that, he would never beg (the image of) his baby brother for booze. And he liked it like that. If he needed alcohol to escape his life, there was something he needed to be doing to fix it instead, and a guilt trip of Al in between the desire and the means usually sobered him up enough to remember that.

Alcohol, one of the worst, easiest abuses ever discovered. And now that he was about to get it—Sometimes, he really hated the world of adults.

"Edward, are you all right?" his apartment-mate asked, suddenly. A little wide-eyed, Ed looked up, bewildered. Unfortunately, as Alfons saw it. "You started breathing heavily. . . ."

"No, no. . . . I'm fine . . . Thanks, though. . . ." He ran his hand through his hair quickly, and then, realizing he was doing it, said with a black edge, "You're awfully sober. Was the night not very fun or something?"

"Oh, it's not that," the look-alike of his brother said, and his voice suddenly rose in pitch; becoming much more cheerful, Ed could imagine for a few moments that the face was really who he wanted it to be. He smiled for the first time that night, daydreaming, when Alfons set down a tall bottle in front of him that jiggled with liquid.

Ed's face lit up, and Alfons smiled down at him. "I wanted to come back and spend some time with you, because I thought you shouldn't have to miss out just because you couldn't come."

While Ed's eyes were shining a bit with amazement, Al motioned for the missing cup. Easily, he poured out a full amount for Ed, and then did the same for himself.

"I can almost guarantee that it tastes pretty good, too," he said as he sat down in the chair opposite Edward. "Happy New Year," he said, tipping the glass.

"Does this mean you're not kicking me out?" Ed asked, tipping his glass as well, and then taking a heavy drink.

Alfons coughed, not just from the lager. He set down the mug, his hands enfolded around it, and it took him a moment to recompose himself before nodding and sighing.

"If we're being truthful with each other—which I think you deserve— . . . I don't know yet. There's something . . . really scary, that you're hiding. When I first met you, you seemed . . . odd, but I would attribute that now to the thought that you come from somewhere not German-speaking, right? That's why you never know what anything is?"

Ed's mouth fell open. After a minute of gaping for answers, his eyebrows arching this way and that, his mouth ticking with nervous smiles, he answered, "That, and you think I'm crazy."

"I didn't say that yet," Al shook his head, pinching his eyes shut.

Ed sat back and laughed, not completely light-heartedly. "Wow, Al. You might be a bit more tipsy than I thought. _How _many _did _you have at the hall?"

"Just two!" Al growled, and Ed draped his arm off the back of the chair, staring at the ceiling as he took a drink.

Dammit, Al thought, he just had to bring this up, didn't he? If he wanted to prolong his life, he had to not stress out to the point where he was making mistakes. _But damn it Edward, how do you always manage to act so sober when I try to bring this up with you? Wait, what am I saying? Maybe he _is_ sane? No, he can't be, he can't. . . . Oh God dammit, you know how to hide it so well, why! Please, Lord in Heaven, show me what I should _do, _I just don't know anymore and I don't understand why this is all on _me_._

Across from Ed, Alfons made an unhappy noise while he ran his hand through his hair and stared at the table. Ed frowned; it effectively burst his bubble of airiness he was using to pretend that he didn't realize how serious the situation was.

He would probably point out that Al could just believe what he said was true and move on, but that would probably cause him to explode. And he felt like sleeping, not freezing to death, tonight.

He took another drink, pushing his chair back on two legs, and let the silence within their ring of light comfort him a little.

Over his head, the clock ticked. Ed sighed.

He knew very well that if he wanted to earn Alfons's trust he'd have to answer all his questions and be cooperative about it. By this point, he didn't really have a problem with that, in theory, but the question was what to say without appearing more suspect. He would tell him the whole truth, had wanted to for a long time, but he knew Alfons wouldn't take it the right way. It was just a fact.

No matter how his problems dealt him hands, he thought as his slightly wavering eyes traced over the ceiling, Alfons was a real person, and he couldn't just push him over and use him as a function of his own personality. He'd been a little spoiled over his life in that respect, he figured. But letting Al take over this time, and just letting himself be pliable . . . he was never sure it was the right thing to do. It was not comforting to know that this world would function just fine without him. But, this was Al. Maybe it wouldn't be that bad?

"Edward, what happened to your father?"

Ed stared. It had sounded . . . accusatory. "You think . . . I _did _something to him? Is_ that_ what you're asking me?"

"Not to be insensitive, but. . . people don't usually up and leave all their belongings one day and then never touch their money, either," Alfons continued, his tiny spark of stubbornness showing through. "Germany is not an easy place to live anymore, you can't just up and leave everything and expect you'll survive. . . ."

Ed put his cheek on his fist and raised an eyebrow. _Don't punch his lights out. Don't punch his lights out._

_ He's just worried about his safety,_ he reasoned, hurriedly, while his hands tightened into fists._ He's asking what he's got to, to make sure he won't get hurt. That's acceptable. That's honorable. Don't knock him into next week. . . . Don't do it, he won't appreciate it. . . . Al needs his teeth._

But it was hard. The tone of "Wouldn't he just get rid of _you, _the broken one, instead?" begged to have some part of dear Alfons be ground under his fist.

"Look," he said, as civilly as he could, drawing on years of having to explain it to people who didn't appreciate being yelled at, "When he left my mother, my brother, and me—when we were _toddlers,_ mind you—he did the exact same thing: Just one day took a suitcase, his coat, and up and left. Maybe he has a pathological need to rid himself of the burdens in his life—" He paused for a second, suddenly stung. Ed frowned at the feeling, and then continued with a snort. "—Who knows? I sure as hell don't."

But . . . his father had left them originally to find a cure, if he believed that. Surely he hadn't been so stupid as to do the exact same thing again?

. . . Had he?

It couldn't have been, Ed reassured himself quickly. Hohenheim would have written, _told _him about it . . . ? He knew Edward needed him, no matter how much Ed refused to admit it, because months of bed-riddence proved without a doubt to anyone as much. And what was more to Ed's mind, his father had _supported_ him for so long that that meant he _wanted _him, right?

. . . Right?

If nothing else, there was the thought that Hohenheim considered him a worthwhile investment. . . . Though maybe the man had just _started out _thinking so_._ There was no documentation in this world stating they were father and son, so it wasn't like he would keep him around only to keep the law off his back. . . .

Though, all of it fit his previous pattern. . . . Damn.

Unless the man was just pathologically incapable of sticking in one place for too long, and he was keeping Ed around because he reminded him—and gave him stories—of their mother.

But Hohenheim had been distant in the last month or two before he disappeared, giving him long, mournful glances when he thought Ed wasn't looking. Just . . . watching him, from afar, forlornly. Granted, being asked about his family members typically had made Ed so mad that he hadn't told his father anything about his mother when he had asked, to the point where he had eventually stopped asking. Though stories of Al, Hohenheim could bait Ed with and did often, and Ed fell for it.

Ed absolutely knew it was happening when Hoenheim did it, but it was the one, the _only_ way he was willing to be used by the man.

His father had always seemed interested in Al—who Al had "become," as he put it—at least up until the point Ed had last seen his little brother. Maybe Hohenheim wasn't capable of—or simply didn't—love his children, but Ed also toiled on the idea that maybe it was just something about _him, _that made him undesirable. He _did _look like his father, as much as that made him want to smash mirrors and burn things. Most days, he managed to avoid doing so, but it was only further complicated by why his father, _too, _ might have a problem with it: His father wouldn't like him, because he _looked_ like him? (And, fuck, acted like him at times, the man had said before.) That maybe . . . Ed's very existence, his acts, had driven his father away from the very beginning. . . ?

But no, his self-worth wasn't defined by what his father did to him, thought of him, whether he loved or didn't love him.

At least, he told himself that.

Ed pressed his hand against his arm to stop the shaking, but the queasy feeling did not relent.

He had thought that his father had probably just gotten sick, but really . . . it could have been far more complicated than his little stupid heart had hoped for.

He sighed, and his shoulders sagging, Ed re-clasped the mug's handle.

The man was never coming back.

Just another person to add to the pile of things that he could never retrieve.

"I don't know why people do the things they do, Alfons," he mourned.

Alfons frowned over his mug. There it was again, that quick little guilty eye flicker that made him know there was something missing. _What just went through your mind right now, Edward, that you didn't tell me?_

He glowered, but then, trying to be nonchalant, he asked over his mead, "Your father never did anything bad to you, did he?"

"What, more than leaving my family in misery and ruin, struggling to survive without him?"_—okay, maybe only emotionally, but still_—"No. He was never cruel to me or anything. Lacking in quite a few areas, but never like you're thinking."

_Neglect is one kind of abuse, you know,_ Alfons grumbled, mouth twisting down. He tipped his head a little, considering the parts of Edward's face he could see, the fine features angry and miserable. _I wonder if he's lying._

"Your father was well held in the scientific community, I know that," Al offered lightly. On any other night, it might have made Ed combative, but this time, it just made him deflate; Alfons watched as he sagged into his chair. Edward took a long, healthy drink, and Heiderich watched as his Adam's apple moved, considering what might happen with his next course of action. Why did something so outwardly beautiful need to be so messed up inside? He certainly didn't want to hurt him more.

"Is it possible you and your father had some argument you don't remember? And he might have told you what's going on?"

Ed scowled furiously over the empty glass and shook his head to match. "No." _I know what you're thinking, and no, I didn't just black out something in my "great madness" I didn't want to hear._ . . . Well, he was pretty sure, anyway: He had no inkling of anything of the like, so . . .

"He had been going out a lot," Ed sighed, going over the problem again. "The night before, in fact, I barely saw him: He came home after I was trying to sleep, as usual, grabbed a few shirts and things and said he had to go back to the lab. . . ."

He frowned in the split second he and Alfons shared a look, and he quickly added, "It wasn't that kind of shirt-grabbing."

Al nodded sympathetically, politely looking away, into the bottom of the mug he swirled.

"Your father didn't look much older than forty-five or fifty at worst, Edward, and so—forgive me for saying this—but what if he had been seeing a woman during the nights? It's not unusual for a man to get remarried, especially older ones with an income. . . . Could it be possible that he's living with her and just left you with all the belongings?"

Edward was shaking his head, but holding his tongue. Alfons quickly peddled on, "I mean, there are many parents that push their kids out on their own as soon as they turn sixteen. It's not necessarily looked at the best, but, they've done what the law requires, and if the kid is raised knowing that all along. . . ."

Ed ran his hand along his scalp a few times, nervous, biting his lip, and still shaking his head, squeezing his long-lashed eyes shut. "I wish I could convey to you how utterly _impossible _that is." _He had claimed that he loved her so much that he would never get remarried. It was so paradoxical to everything I'd ever decided about him but I _believed _it. . . ._

Hoenheim seriously didn't _tell _him about some woman because he'd feared what Ed might have done to her?

Edward knew his father was not a great man, but . . . was his father really that much of a coward? Was _he_?

Alfons didn't realize just how much Edward could put the emotion of "my life has just been crushed" on his face, but it happened in a matter of seconds. He'd been hoping that if Ed could hear that his father might have eked out a happy life for himself (despite Ed refusing to believe it, if von Hohenheim maybe had said it and Ed had force-forgotten), then maybe it could spur him into the same action for himself one way or another. Or maybe get him to look for the man.

Unfortunately though, it had the exact opposite effect: Edward sank back into his chair, and looked like all the happiness in his life had been stolen from him, forever.

Carefully avoiding anything like sighing, Alfons stared at the bottle of beer still on the table. It had to be said, and the reaction was only helping formulate his picture of what was going on in Edward's head.

"Tell me about your mother," he said as he poured Edward more alcohol, sounding appropriately pained instead of clinical. "What happened to her?"

Ed's lip quivered before he spoke words in grieved, forcibly light tones, and he accepted the drink only automatically, devoid of any emotion or feeling from it. "She died when we were little; some women do that, apparently: they are too devoted to their husbands that when they are left behind, they get sick with worry or pain and . . . they die." He shook his head, voice cracking high at the end. "Despite that their boys need them." He forced his head back and took a deep drink. "I'm not quite sure if she was sick, or just hurt inside, too stressed—if_ our _unrelenting idiocy and stupid needs caused it—I was too young to really notice anything that intelligent." He frowned into the mead, bitter. "Too young to know it could happen."

Al stared. Somehow, when Ed acted tough, he never sent off the vibes of being the type of person who still held guilt over something like that.

"She sounds like a nice woman," he said eventually, looking at Ed only so long as Ed continued to stare into his lap and not notice him.

"She was," Ed whispered across the quiet table, hushed and small in the cold, desolate room. He tucked his legs in a little closer, and wrapped one arm around his chest. "She always made sure we had everything we needed. . . . that she could provide, anyway. Until she disappeared from our lives, too."

Alfons winced. He looked aside, and wondered if it was one of their derelict orphanages that helped Edward along to where he was. "Who raised you, after that?" he asked, hushed.

"No one," he answered, much to Alfons's surprise. "My brother and I, we lived by ourselves. Our neighbor looked in on us once in a while, but we lived alone. She had a granddaughter, though, 'Winry?' Oh, she was nice, and pretty too. You should'a _seen_ this girl!" He sighed and flopped back into his seat; even though his voice was happy, his face knitted in grief and he may have even been throwing tears back, though Alfons couldn't quite tell in the moonlight, now that it fell in the middle of the table and not on his roommate directly.

"You would have liked her, I think," Edward continued, nursing his drink in his hand, lethargic. "But, well. . . . Missed _that_ chance." Not that he had one with much of anyone normal _now _either, what with missing substantial pieces.

Alfons nodded. He knew what it was like to lose chances, but it was awkward to hear; it even hurt inside. Genuinely, quietly, almost afraid to ask, he was starting to speak to Ed like Ed was a bit of a traumatized child.

"And what about your little brother?" he asked slowly, gently, into the quiet night, not sure he wanted to know. "Where is _he?"_

Ed felt like he was under a bag of sand. His shoulders sank even further, and he hid his face to the side immediately.

Al knew he didn't really want to know. "He didn't leave you, too, did he?" he eventually prodded, in Ed's silence, looking for Ed's face. Even if it may have all been amplified in Ed's mind, how much worse could this poor kid's life get?

After a long time, Ed muttered, "Um. . . ."

". . . Did he . . . fight in the War?"

Ed shook his head slowly, listless. "No, actually," he whispered, though he sounded unsure about it. ". . . _I _did. . . ."

"_You_ did?" Alfons asked, suddenly brighter. Ed hardly noticed, and Al was sort of glad—he would have noticed how much Heiderich envied the soldiers, thereby giving away the fact that he hadn't been one. However, it also made sense on the Ed front: this could be proof that he was shell-shocked. But . . . , Alfons thought suddenly, did that mean . . . that Edward had watched his brother die? It would make a lot of sense. . . .

Maybe it was just that it may be the only time he could, and he knew it was cruel, but he really wanted to pry this part of Edward open.

"Which side did you fight on?"

Ed scowled at him, fierce and mean, forcing eye contact. _"Ours?_"

Al hesitated and then forced a smile. "Right, sorry," he said, sitting back and looking at the ceiling. "So, when was the last time you saw him?"

Ed's eyes trailed along the edge of the table. How could he spin it with any sort of truth?

". . .Uhm, yeah, . . . about that. . . ."

"Edward—"

"I guess it would be . . . right before I was lying on a floor bleeding to death? About . . . two years ago?"

Al's eyes widened, and Ed watched as his roommate gave him a once-over. "But if you weren't fighting together, why was he—Wait, your brother wasn't the one who—?"

"No, no—!" Ed made a reassuring motion, but then stopped cold. A thoughtful look crossed his face, and then he stared down, horribly sad-looking. Eventually, he sighed and continued, "No. No, it wasn't him. It was just me being careless. It was my fault."

Al shook his head. "You got shot, then? And he—?"

"No, no. I was _impaled_, Al. He brought me back to life, and then . . ."—he couldn't say 'and then I brought _him_ back'—"and yeah, that was the last time I saw him."

"Back to life?" Al boggled. "Wait, you're not old enough to have your younger brother be a medic. . . . I couldn't fight in the war and you're only a year plus half older than me. . . ." He scowled, finally, inexorably, frustrated. "Ed, why won't you tell me the truth? Why do you keep lying? What _happened _to your _brother."_

Ed just boggled, shaking his head. "Al, I don't want to talk about this anymore, please. . . . I've answered your other questions without a word of fraud, please. . . ."

"Why won't you tell me?" Al pleaded, feeling a coil of tension wind his nerves into knots. "I _need _to know."

"What makes you think _that_?" Ed demanded.

"You're living in my house, and I need to ensure the safety of all within it, that's why!"

"I could tell you but you won't believe me, so why should I? You're just being a pushy prick now!"

"I can't trust you!" Al said, jumping to his feet with his palms flat on the table, his voice tight and almost panicked. _And I only have a year or two left, I can't be worrying about _you, _my _friend,_ shortening my life! I don't have much time, don't take the days I have left away from me right at the very end! Don't ask that of me, anyone—!_

Ed scowled and stood up to match Alfons, but he merely gripped the back of the chair, angry and confused. "Why don't you trust me _now_? You seemed _fine _when you let me move in, and you know nothing more now than you did then!"

"That was then! You needed someone, I couldn't just leave you, but it's time to stop draining the both of us into the ground!" As Ed drew back, Alfons threw his hand down against the table and shook his head, sucking in short breaths of rasping air.

"Edward, why can't you just admit that your brother is _dead_? He's as dead as my family was the morning after our house collapsed, why can't you deal with that!"

Ed's mouth gaped. "Wait, Alfon—"

"This is why I can't _trust _you, Edward," he explained, pained. "Mad people are dangerous because you can't trust them to stay in the world with the rest of us, or even recognize me from day to day!" He took a breath, shaking, desperate, frustrated, and tightened his hand into a fist at his rasping chest. "Tell me, tell me right now, is it that you just can't deal with it and make up these stories to make yourself feel better, or do you seriously believe these things _happened?"_

Ed shook his head, holding up his hands in a placating gesture, face drawn in worry. Only half the table and a chair separated them, and Alfons was hunched over it like he was ready to bolt for the stairs should that change. "Your family's _dead? That's _why you never talk about them, why you never go home?—"

_ "Yes, _Edward, _all right? _Yes! Our house was bombed and I have the fucking scars to prove it! _Now will you answer my question if you really give a damn!"_

He took several breaths, wild and panicked; his hands gripped the spine of the chair to the point that his knuckles turned white. To Ed's bewildered stare, he pleaded, "I _care _about you, Edward, I do, I think you're a good guy when you're sane but I can't help you if you don't admit you have a _problem, _and I don't have the means nor the heart anymore to support your _madness and _my _own_. . . _.Please. _ Help me _help _you, before I have to let you _go_. . . ."

He hung his head in shame, and slowly shook it back and forth while his shoulders heaved. Ed shook his head as well, but quickly, feeling along the wall as his eyes darted around in the darkness. He didn't want to be hearing this. He didn't want to know the shadow of his brother hurt like this, had things as well that he couldn't get away from. How much of this Al's past was his fault too, somehow, for his transgression? For the way he treated him while he was here? He shook his head, and stared at anything he could that wasn't Alfons.

_ Please, don't let it be like this, _he pleaded to the forces of the night. _It wasn't supposed to be like this._

Ed ran his hand over his mouth and took a long, deep breath, wondering what to do. He could tell Alfons everything—perhaps it was time—but ... should his ace fail to impress him, what was he going to do? How could he spin it so that Alfons would believe him, religious, politically-brainwashed "little" Alfonsthat apparently was as troubled as him?

_ I did not want this, I never wanted this. I didn't want to get involved, and I didn't want to see you hurt. I don't want to see _that_ you hurt. I knew I shouldn't have talked to you but I _needed _you. _Why_ do I have to make this decision?_

Without Alfons, this entire apartment was just wood and metal and nails, a dark night where no one cared. They could both disappear, and maybe five people would know, thousands in his own world would be left to forever wonder. Ed shut his eyes and shivered, a cold in the pit of his stomach that he'd managed not to feel for several hours. Suddenly aware of the biting cold and silence ghosting against his skin, and the man refusing to look at him in front of him, he let his shoulders sag. His head tipped to the side, then rolled up to look at the ceiling, and then, he stared at the table and eventually the open window, cold silver pouring through in beams. Like that silver watch he'd given up so much for.

Cold. Silver. Calming.

Eventually, staring out the window, he said in somber tones, "I'm sorry about your family."

"_I am too_," Alfons replied. He was breathing a little hard as he scowled, and the slightly rumbling sound of his lungs moving was the only prevalent noise in the darkness.

Ed shivered a little, and clutched his aching right shoulder. _You have to do something, because he needs you. And you need him. You _owe_ it to him._

"I loved my little brother very much, and in deference to him, I think I will tell you this."

_ Brother, _he heard in the back of his mind as he stepped around the chair. He reached for the buttons of his shirt, and uncomfortably brushed off the voice and the tingling in his skin.

_Yes, Al, I'm thinking of you._ But the memory of his voice wasn't helping right now, thank you very much brain. Especially sounding that would his brother be in physical pain like that?

"What . . . are you doing?" Alfons asked nervously, hesitantly moving around the chair he still held so that he faced Edward more readily.

Ed took in a heavy breath, and then let it out shakily. One button flipped out of its loop, and with practiced confidence he moved his right hand down to hold tight the lapel of his shirt while his left hand plucked another tiny milky button between his slower left-hand fingers. "Al, my stories are all true." He nodded, moving to another button, slightly clumsy, and then tugging the bottom of the workshirt out of his pants. He didn't let himself look at the emotion on Alfons's face. He wasn't sure he could handle it, basically telling "his brother" what had happened to their bodies without Al having ever known. Having ever _needed_ to know. Should he really . . . drag him the last bit into this?

If this wasn't hell . . . he'd certainly go there for this.

"I believe it because it's true. I never told you, but _I _am the Fullmetal Alchemist, and I will prove this to you once and for all."

_Brother!_ Alphonse's voice shot into his head again, edging on panicked; the image of his face, frightened, his body pushing back into a surface that wouldn't go anywhere flashed into Ed's mind, and in the moment that it took to pass, Ed was left with a slightly nauseous, dizzying headache. He stared at the floor for a second, taking a deep breath while forcing the feeling to disappear. He didn't like how scared it left him feeling; he couldn't tell if his body's sensations were coming as a reaction to the image or something else.

He pushed through and got down to the last two buttons. To Al's stupefied face he pushed off the left half of his threadbare shirt over his shoulder. Pulling his arm entirely out of the sleeve and letting the fabric drape down, he then did the same with his right.

"What . . . what is _that?" _Alfons gasped, gaping at the glinting metal buckles adorning Ed's skin. It wasn't a cover for being _burned,_ he wondered, until he remembered Ed's stories. "D-Don't tell me you have a metal arm under there?" he laughed, nervously.

Ed laughed thinly to match Alfons's nervous chuckle, taking a rather sick, long breath. He shook his head, though, and aimed for the two large buckles across his chest. "I am from another world." He pulled the straps loose and then, delicately, started pulling on the flesh of his right arm like a glove. Al shivered visibly and tried not to look, but he found it exceedingly hard to _not _watch Edward pulling his skin off like clothing.

When the false skin was inched all the way down, Edward shirked his shoulder out of it, laid it on the table, and then turned to push into the light what was attached to his shoulder. Al stared in horror, and with a soft cry hunched in on himself and took a few steps back. He shook his head, and gripped the nearest piece of furniture for dear life. "No. You're crazy. What is this, what did you do to yourself. . . ."

"Why don't you believe me?" Ed asked, more than a little hurt creeping into his voice. "Remember? The alchemist lost his arm, and got it replaced by . . ." He looked at his arm for a second with a bit of a grimace, lifting it to shoulder height and articulating the fingers. He went back to Al, forcing a smile. ". . . The best replacement he could get."

"You are _crazy_, Edward," Alfons hissed, looking between Ed and his arm with equal parts fascination and horror. "Other worlds don't exist. Especially not ones with magic and metal arms in them; it's heresy, don't try to tell me these things. . . ."

He was backing up, hanging onto the kitchen counter for support, but the words coming out of his mouth seemed to be severely slowed by his staring at the darkly glinting metal contours of the many intricacies of the mechanical limb. Ed wondered with a bit of amusement if he could make Alfons pass out if he showed him his leg, and then remembered that he didn't actually want to torture the mirror of his brother, who right now, staggered back against the derelict counters like a trapped animal, looked pretty tormented.

Ed frowned and bit his lip. "I thought you liked my stories?"

"As _stories," _Alfons squeaked.

Across from him, Edward sighed, and put his hands on his hips—both of them, if you could call it both? Al wondered in a fog. Oh God, he was getting a horrible headache, and he was starting to not breathe straight, think straight—Why was he shaking so much, it was just a metal arm that meant all his stories were true; there was no technology like that that he knew of, unless it was from Britain perhaps, or America—?

"Where did you get that?" he asked finally, gasping. There had to be an explanation for this. One that involved facts, and science, not magic!

Ed gave him a queer look, he assumed from the way he tipped his head in the shadow. He spread both his arms out in a fashion something like a religious figure, and in the absolutely quiet shadows, Alfons again got the impression he very well could have been a demon of some sort.

"If your god can create a universe, Alfons, why not more than one? Maybe I just come from another Earth in the same universe, I'm not really sure," Ed told him. "But there are as many races of people here as there are in my lands: if you lived only in this country you would be surprised to find the other inhabitants of this Earth as well, but does that make them not real? You can live your life in doubt, or you can believe me." Half naked, he shrugged, asking "well?" with his body language. He was oddly muscular, for a deranged scientist, which did not help the whispers in Alfons's mind. "Even Einsteinian physics, your scientific cannon, says it: if there is one, there can be another, _must _be another—If there is one universe, there has to be an unlimited number of others, parallel even, to your own. And that," he shrugged, "happens to be mine."

"No, Edward, it doesn't work like that," Alfons hissed, almost vehemently, shaking his head over and over and repositioning his grip. "People don't fall out of the sky; worlds don't connect; there is no "alchemy;" there is only Heaven and Hell and Earth and I suppose purgatory, but there certainly is no great alchemic world!"

"I wish I could show it to you," Ed said, mournfully. He looked to his arm, and his brows knitted together. He considered his apartment mate, and then glanced away, frowning. _But I don't want to take that chance._ Shaking it off, he held out his flesh hand to Alfons. "Sometimes, the simplest things are the truth, Al. How much will you have to give up just to believe me?"

Al did a combination of shaking and nodding his head all at once, and Ed thought he made out his eyes running all over the room. "I guess you've answered my questions, Edward," he said. "And I think I know what to do with you—"

"No, Al—!"

Ed cast forward and gripped the back of the chair between them with his left hand, and in that moment a flash buzzed through his body. He was suddenly someone else, being at once his brother and a man towering over him.

_And that's what's going to happen to you, said his deep voice. In his right hand, he brandished a shining tool in dark light, and in his left, the neck of a chair he rose from._

_ "You really don't remember a fucking thing, do you."_

_ Below him, in a haggard ball and half in shadow, Al, his Al, shook his head. He couldn't speak, he didn't _want _to speak; he ducked his head down and in that moment Ed felt bindings_ _against his mouth. His feet were tied up and his arms were shackled in metal. He shook, because he was bleeding; he was cold. Then, there was pain all over, blooming; Al seized up and he would have screamed, a scream Ed had not heard in many, many years and had hoped to never hear again._

_ When the crackling quieted and Al's jerking ceased, his large feet clacked across the floor in slow, even steps. He bent down and jerked Al close by his throat, and he didn't resist. Al looked at him, big, brown Alphonse's eyes, and then they widened abruptly. A knife slid to the base of Al's neck, and he stilled in the glint from the blade. The man gently pulled Al's head to the side, letting the back of the blade slide up his neck and push his hair back. _The blades are all dull. They'll saw and they'll tear but they won't cut.

_Al quivered under his wide fingers, dug into his cheeks. _And when that's done, I might get to your tendons, or shock them dead—Did you know you can still live like that? Unable to move? And yet, you'll still be able to feel everything. . . .

_Help me, help me, someone help me! I can't die like this! Brother, I have to find you, where are you?—Winry, Auntie—_

_ The knife pressed under Al's chin, and tipped his head back further._

_ No—!_

Alfons stared without a word as Edward suddenly pitched forward with a slight gasp, and then came to lay on their floor without a sound. After several long seconds of glancing around the room and staring at the immobile body, Alfons pushed off the counter a step, daring to bend to the side a little to get a better look at Edward's face. Just as Ed had reached out, he had collapsed onto the floor, and now he was on the tile, staring at nothing. His eyes were wide open, but there was nothing in them. No one was home.

Al swallowed hard, and glanced around the room again, nervously. It had not changed, though he kept expecting something to happen. He peered down at Edward again, shifting backwards.

It couldn't be that he himself was dreaming? Ed probably hadn't been "struck down" by some invisible force, but . . . what if this "was it"? Cautiously, he stuck out his foot towards Edward's nearest limb—his real(?) arm—hoping nothing would eat his foot.

What if he had snapped? What if it was a ploy? Ed couldn't have been that drunk yet—

"Edward!" Alfons hissed into the dark at the lump, hanging onto the counter as a land line. "I'm not going to fall for this! This is not something that's going to make me care, do you understand me? This is crazy! Get a hold of yourself—"

_—Don't be dead?_

Ed suddenly gasped and jerked, startling Alfons into crashing back into the sink with a cry and skittering away toward the corner the L-shaped counters made. Ed was immediately on his hands and knees, shaking like a leaf and staring at nothing.

"I saw him," he breathed, frantic. "My brother's in trouble. He's gonna die!" he cast about quickly, and stopped suddenly when he suddenly saw Alfons.

"Edward, you are _crazy!" _Al shouted back at that look, scared out of his mind and on his last nerve. What the hell could he use as a weapon, he was trapped next to nothing at all! "God dammit, Edward, this is _not_ a ploy that'll make me care! I won't, do you hear me?!"

"I'm not crazy!" Ed roared, coming up in a blur and grabbing him by the lapels. "I saw him _dying_, my brother is dying! _I have to do something!" _he shrieked.

Alfons grabbed for Ed's hands, but recoiled when he hit the metal one, his brain processing it as sharp; cold to the point of hot. Over his shoulder a streak of moonlight came through, and in that, Alfons could see the absolutely wild look in Edward's one, illuminated eye.

Al shook his head and in a fit of adrenaline not only pushed the man off of him but threw him bodily into the floor, landing on top of him and pinning him down. "Edward, he's not _dying, _you can't _help _him; he's already _dead!"_

Ed immediately tensed, and looked like he was about to cry: "_. . . Wha-at?_" he asked, shaking. "You don't mean that. . . ."

"Then where _is _he, Edward? Look around. Do you see anyone dying?" Al thunked him into the ground once, though not hard. Still keeping one sizably larger hand fisted around Ed's shirt, he sat back on Ed's abdomen and gestured around the quiet room. Edward's look followed his hand, and indeed for a moment Al thought he had him with the dead silence in the room, bereft of even street noise at this hour.

But under him, Ed shook half his body in denial, pressing one palm into his forehead and trembling at the vivid words, images, from his mind. Those feelings, the absolute terror injected into his body. . . He would be the first to admit there was no scientific basis for them, no reason to believe them as fact—hell, he couldn't even tell _when _they were from, good God it could have all happened already and not be happening now, oh Al—but there was something too random, too strong about it to be the delusions of a single mind.

Hyperventilating, Ed leaned into the floor for balance and hid his eyes with his hands, wishing they could cover his entire head. "No. No, Al, I don't want you die. Don't die. Do whatever it takes, I'm here with you. Don't let it end like this, if you're still alive. . . ."

_ "So, is there anyone that's going to come looking for you, hmm?"_

_ Under him, Al's youthful face was smeared over with blood from his cuts, his nose; his eyes were huge, cathartically wide. A glint of metal came into view, just at the edge—it was what Al was staring at._

_ His was shaking his head, and then all of a sudden nodded vigorously: "Yes! Yes there are! People who will send out a search for me tonight if I don't come back! They should be looking by now—!"_

_ He smiled with a purr. "Hmmm. Then I guess it'll be even better when they find your hand a few days from now in a gutter. And I'll dice the rest of you up into _tiny _pieces, that they'll never, _ever _find."_

_ Al's breathing stopped. The knife flipped around, and on the hilt, there was an array Ed couldn't make out._

_ "Ready to go again?"_

Brother—

_ Al's choking gasp, and then, the feeling of his limbs locking up._

On top of him, Alfons just stared, tremors racing up and down his body as his muscles waited for a command. He couldn't take this—if Ed got near a weapon, hell a kitchen knife or even a broken bottle, he would be absolutely done for. He could manhandle him in a fist fight most likely, but they were both drunk-ish and the insane had amazing strength in their fits and Al didn't know how to fight—

Light came over Ed's eyes again, but only partially so. Alfons stared as Ed shook his head.

_Brother, help me, I don't want to die—_It ran over and over in his head until it broke free, forcing him into action. He heaved up into a sitting position, blindly shoving the man on his chest back with one fell thrust until his legs were free. He should be able to get there, he should be able to get home_—Al's dying!—_if he could just get the arrays to work; there had to be a reason it was tonight, certainly fate wouldn't just let him watch his brother die like this while the other one was telling him things right here?_—_

He stopped, and, still panting a little, looked through his fingers at Alfons, crouched on the floor.

Oh yes it would.

And the gateway to stop it was right in front of him.

A second or two after Ed slowed, Alfons's half attempt to get to his feet in order to flee ceased, and he stilled like a prey animal while Edward watched him.

They stared at each other for several long seconds, Heiderich watching him on a hair trigger, breath rasping a little, and Edward opposite him, hunched over and silent, intent.

Then, Ed didn't move toward him exactly, but taking a deep breath through his nose, he stood with straightened back and stared down at Alfons as if incensed; inching back, Al watched him from his spot on his knees. For probably the first time in his life Ed towered over him and it was scary as fucking hell, a silver-outlined A-frame against the rest of the blackened room.

Ed set his stance, squared his shoulders, and stared down at Alfons with his head tipped back. "I am going to get home, Alfons. You are part of my story now whether you like it or not. And because I am a good guy, I will do, what it takes me to do, to help you while I am here. You are the incarnation of my brother, and whether you like it or not I think we are tied together, and I will not let you go."

Alfons shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes off of the shadow that was Edward. It took him long enough that halfway through, he realized he could have been running by now.

Ed stepped forward.

Al bolted for the back of the room. But before he cleared the kitchen, Edward had leapt forward and in two steps caught him around the shoulders and _threw _him into the wall using Heiderich's own momentum. The wainscoting thundered in the shockwave; Al could see nothing but stars and he wasn't sure if he was falling or not.

As soon as he could release Al's shirtfront, Ed smacked his hands together and, stepping on Alfons's foot and knocking his forehead into his, he pressed one palm on his chest and one on Al's. If his brother and this man really were alike, their souls might be at the same frequency; and if not, _Ed _had the soul frequency, as Alphonse's brother—the DNA—and this Al could be a connecting point between the worlds to his Alphonse.

He surged his energy into his hands, reaching out to find his brother's soul; the bodies in the room around it; and if he could, channel some energy through his brother to transmute _something_ in the room to help him. Maybe he'd just electrocute the man he'd seen, but that too would be enough.

He prayed for it to work, almost felt his mind break through to something, but the crescendo of energy in his chest, his head, his hands, did not break free into another plane that amplified it. It simply grew and fizzled. There was nothing but blackness in his mind, a decline in adrenaline, and when he opened his eyes, staring somewhere at Alfons's knees, he knew in a terrible cold that it had failed completely.

Like always.

"Fuck!" He pulled back his hands and stared at them, entirely unaware that he was still standing on Alfons Heiderich.

"Dammit!" Alfons yelled at him, shoving him back and socking him in the nose.

As Ed stumbled back into the room with a yelp, blind-sided and bleeding in his several places. Alfons huddled against the wall and panted, shocked, amazed, and horrified. "What the hell was _that?" _He was shaking his head. "I must be dreaming; that's it, I'm dreaming, and when I wake up in the morning I will find out I just drank wayyy too much and this is all just a dream. That's it. That's it—" He shoved a little farther away from Ed, ready to flee.

Ed barely felt the pain in his face, the blood starting to flow down his nose and over his teeth from cuts in his mouth. His eyes cast over the floor, his hands, anything in his memory that could helphim make an array.

Knives, there had been so many transmutations still didn't work, not even with Alfons—sorry Alfons—and he had no more ideas than he'd had before. Death maybe, death maybe could do the trick because of energy and transfer of planes, but whose, and how, and he couldn't really do that without risking too much but he would do it if he had to, dammit—

Clutching his stomach and his arm, half bent over, he finally stopped staggering and in a bright beam of moonlight looked up at Al, only after a minute realizing it wasn't his brother he was looking at.

This place. This _place!_ His brother was going to die. He was going to die, and there was nothing he could do. He was stuck here, sent images of it, and yet he couldn't get _to_ it—what kind of hell _was _this! Why would this be _happening?_ _Alphonse, I'm sorry, I—!_ _I can't do anything to save you. . . ._

He looked at Alfons while he sobbed, and Al looked back at him, utterly terrified.

They stared at each other for a second, and then Ed, still sucking in too much air and half sobbing through maniacal chuckling, gripped the chair in front of him for balance and held out his right arm, the hundreds of metal pieces of the hand glinting in the thick silver beam. "What are you afraid of, Alfons?" he asked, hysterical. His hair, disheveled now, dripped over shoulder and around his face.

In front of his eyes, he saw knives again, ropes, chains, and arrays; an electric zap burst into his cerebellum, jolting _that feeling_ through his body again. On the other side of his vision, he heard Alphonse yell, then sob and cry, jerking bonds that pulled flesh from his ankles and _bled_.

_ This niggling . . . Feeling, in the back of his mind. It said, _"You _need _him.**"**

He looked back at Alfons sharply, gold eyes catching just the littlest bit of moonlight through the kitchen window far to the side. _I never had these "feelings" until I was here. This world, the fact I'm with you now and seeing this, this night. . . . It must mean __something__—!_

Alfons was still hanging against the wall when he did the strangest thing. Ed watched him only absently, mind racing through every argument he'd ever asked himself about why he couldn't get arrays to work, as Alfons's right hand slowly went up to his chest, and clutched at something underneath his shirt. Ed stopped and tipped his head, concerned that something might be happening, until he remembered that Alfons always wore his cross to work.

Ed turned his gold-clad head behind him, searching out the space next the kitchen window through which the faint moonlight was coming through, and noticed, perhaps for the first conscious time, the picture of the saint hanging on the side of one of the cabinets. Edward turned back, silent, and let Alfons finish his muttered prayer, listening to the cadence of foreign words.

. . . Had he ever heard that language before?

When Al looked up at him expectantly and nothing happened, Ed tipped his head to the other side and asked, a little breathlessly, "What, you weren't expecting horns to appear or something, were you?"

Al threw down his hands and in a bluster came off the wall, grabbed a panicked Ed's left hand, and hauled him across the wood.

"There is _no coincidence _that this is tonight. You've never come to church with me, not_ ever _have you said a single _prayer. . . ."_

"Where are we going--hey, take your hands off me, we'll freeze to death out there!"

"I don't care, Edward. Come with me or I will banish you from my house!"

"But, Al—!"

_ "Do it!" _he roared.

As Ed pulled back on his shirt he looked back from Al to their apartment, and all he saw was the door closing on darkness. He stared at Alfons's broad back in the half-cloudy night, surrounded by snow, dark buildings, and grey plumes of breath speeding by. _That feeling _struck him again, but _differently_:It flashed into his mind, a little bit of electricity all over his body that settled in his stomach, that made him think of his brother, but was not a direct message or vision. He saw the cloth moving on Alfons's back, felt the warm touch of his hand against his wrist, and he knew, with one-hundred percent certainty, that the feeling to follow Alfons now was not a thought coming from within his own mind or his brother's.

"Run faster," he pleaded, and Alfons was all too willing to comply.

* * *

A/N: And suddenly, because this author can put extreme violence into _anything._

This may be one of the longest unbroken scenes I have ever written. O_o Just goes to show you there's always something new waiting for you in your own writing, even after years of doing it.

Made again with great beta service by the jubilant Hoenheim-of-Light-51.


	4. Chapter 4

The street lined with five and six-story buildings, dark under the cloudy night sky looming above, suddenly opened up to reveal a towering grey expanse of arches, spires, and gargoyles looming over the street.

Snow crunched under their feet; cold wind burned his skin as they ran. Ed looked to Alfons, who checked back at him at the same moment; their eyes locked and Alfons turned back ahead, furious. The grip on Ed's arm tightened and yanked him forward.

Thoughts spread over the numbness in Ed's mind since he'd started running. The bricks of the foreign city flew past, in the muffled, moonlit winter streets; it extended into the snow beneath his feet and the too-fleeing figure of his brother grown in a completely different world. . . . How strange was it, this night and all the things that culminated to make it, he thought, the sensation from his body strangely muted, like he was looking from behind his own eyes.

"Where are you taking me?" he heard himself ask.

"Here," Alfons snapped, hurrying up the wide fleet of stone stairs to the massive front doors of the cathedral. Ed checked up, and was greeted by a massive, round, stained-glass array suspended in the stories above the door.

_Array. . . ._

Ed's eyes caught the stars and clouds reflecting gently in the panes, but the pattern of colors, the design of the metal frame, it was all very familiar.

"Will it be open?" he asked Al, suddenly, who was still holding his arm while pulling on the door hook.

"It's New Year's, it'll be open for confessions all night," he answered, brusquely. _"In." _He got the door open just enough to admit Ed's slim frame, and then shoved him through.

Ed stumbled into the massive sanctuary and Alfons shut the door behind them.

"Stay _here," _he threatened, "or don't bother going back."

Ed just stared at him blankly; Alfons hurried down the sanctuary pews away from him, coughing into his hands without missing a step.

Ed tracked Heiderich's back down to the end of the room, and as Al's miniaturized form checked left and right and then disappeared behind the confessional blocking the view, Ed's eyes trailed to the many candles twinkling on the altar.

His brother would like this view. He had always liked the ones in Lior.

Amidst the little white candles, there was a giant statue's foot. Two of them, in sandals. Ed tipped his head back, slowly, all the way to the ceiling. A draping toga, long hair and a beard, and above his head, an arc of stone with letters he couldn't quite make out from the distance.

Ed blinked up at all of it, the design of the sun hanging in the background. It wasn't exactly the same, no, but it left him looking around the rest of the place. Good Lord, even the innumerable rows of pews were the same shape, length, and color. This cathedral wasn't anywhere near where this world's version of Lior should be, but . . .

_Alphonse,_ he mourned, staring at his feet, thinking of the stained-glass circle somewhere above and behind his head.

He wanted to stop this madness, make himself find a way to fix the feeling in his chest that Al _was dying,_ but in a way he didn't as well, because he didn't know that he could do anything other than accept it. He could run himself into forever, and never get any closer to the goal.

No, this was Alphonse they were talking about, whose life was more important to him that anything, the whole reason he lived and breathed---the whole reason he was _Here_: He had to try every last thought until it killed him.

_Killed him. . . ._ Volumes of memories flooded through his mind, and he shivered.

"There he is, father," Alfons told the Cardinal, thankful to find the little blond still there. "Just where I left him."

"My son," came a deep voice, as two pairs of polished shoes appeared in front of Ed. He looked up, and gasped.

While Ed gaped, the grey-haired man offered him his hand.

"Cornello!" he hissed, tugging his shirt closed and hiding his right hand behind his body.

"Have . . . we met, son?" the man queried with a smile.

Ed's mouth stayed open, until he grumbled and ran a hand through his hair. "Nuh–No. . . . No, we haven't. . . ."

The cardinal looked at Alfons, and Alfons, for all his sudden youth next to the man, looked apologetic and a bit chagrined. "That's one of his . . . many traits I was telling you about," he said, pained.

Cornello shook his head, and shaking off the bewilderment, turned back to Ed with a smile. "Your friend tells me he's a little concerned about you. Do you mind if I recite a prayer for you?"

Ed scowled and looked accusingly at Alfons, who had the decency to make eye contact and look uncomfortable about it. Ed turned back to the spitting image of the dead prophet. "Did he tell you I'm not baptized, too? Will that put a _kink _in your plans?" Dammit, he didn't have _time _for this, _Alphonse_—

The priest smiled kindly after a moment of hesitation. "No, my son," he said gently, raising his bible and his right hand in a strange configuration. "Will you let us bless you on this gracious night?" He tried to look amused. "It shouldn't hurt, I promise."

Ed frowned, staring at the man hard. Maybe he was not so much of a crook in this plane of existence, but he didn't trust it. And seeing Alfons standing there next to him, not only backing him but using him as a _shield_.

For a moment, Ed was silent, watching them, listening for that internal _sense_ that had been around, but there was a conspicuous silence.

"Fine," he said, agitated. "Do your worst, Cardinal. Nothing's going to happen."

Ed plunked himself down on the nearest pew, crossed his legs and folded his arms, scowl black.

There _had_ to be a way to make transmutations work here, there _had_ to be; it didn't make sense otherwise. And Alfons and these guys, well they were just nuts, expecting to expel some demons from him or something as the priest started to chant.

He was so _close!_ Ed tipped his head, kicking the pew-back. He was getting closer to his world every moment—Cornello, Al, and he, all sitting in a massive sanctuary like this, candles going—and the "feelings" had stopped. . . . Did that mean something? As much as he didn't believe in guided "things" like that, he couldn't deny what was going on in front of his face.

Oh holy damn, Al, please let this all be his imagination. He would give up anything right now for this to be a dream. He pinched the bridge of his nose. _You can't die._

Water droplets smacked into his forehead and he jerked back, offended, turning at the two next to him. Al was looking anxious behind the black robes that half-obscured him, and Ed didn't bother to look up at Cornello.

Growling a little, he turned back to the view of the statue and pulpit, feeling a need to fidget while he suppressed the oncoming hysteria. But this time he was unable to fully tune out the words of the priest. To the contrary, he picked it up fully, though he had no clue what language it was. Something foreign, old-sounding. . . . The same language Alfons had been speaking before?

A nagging feeling jabbed into Ed's stomach. He had read some fables with magic, how it supposedly worked. There were spells, prevalent in this world's ideas of how to make it work. And religions, if he had learned anything in all his years, somehow incorporated the way to make the spectacular, be it Ishvallan which tried to stop it or various things here, which tried to summon it. . . .

Quietly, Ed flicked his eyes up to the statue, the words above it. _'Brother, help me—!'_ he ran through is head, forcing himself to put all the pieces together in every permutation. Spread out above the statue in a great stone banner, the words inscribed in that foreign language, suddenly became very familiar, now that his eyes had adjusted to the light.

"That's it!" he jumped up and slapped his hand on the pew back in front of him, and Alfons and Cornello both jumped back, startled. Ed whipped his head around to them. "That language you're speaking! What's it called!"

"...La...tin?" Alfons answered for him in a small voice, when Cornello was still too surprised to switch trains of thought.

"Father!" Ed continued, turning back to him, only after a second of awkwardness at calling this man that. "Do you have something to write with? Chalk from a classroom? Even ashes would work—Alfons!" he breathed heavily, smiling a bit at the startled man, "help me move the furniture, here—"

Ed went for the nearest pew to see if it was moveable. Horrified, it took Alfons a few seconds to respond. "Edward, stop. . . ?" his voice said weakly. He looked to the Cardinal once, upset, and then back at Ed, who suddenly looked hurt when he found he wasn't assisting.

Al shook his head, slowly, back and forth, and as he did so, much to Ed's dismay, his eyebrows pinched closer and closer together as he stepped closer. Ed started stepping back, but then stopped when Alfons tracked him step for step. Alfons got right up in front of him without a word, and then suddenly, Ed found himself pressed into Al's broad chest, the man's arms wrapped tightly around his back.

"You are stark raving _mad, _Edward," he whispered, slowly rocking back and forth as he pressed the back of Ed's head into him. "You don't need to do something like this to make me care. It just makes me more worried about you. Please, stop—"

Alfons pulled him back from the comforting, if somewhat awkward, warmth of his chest and scent of his cologne, as he took Ed by the cheeks and forced him to look into his eyes. Ed stared at him, silent and wide-eyed, in a strange sense enthralled by the contact, the attention from his "brother's" face.

"I don't want the last time I see you to be like this, do you understand me?"

_Meaning you'll ship me off if I don't stop, from this very spot,_ Edward realized, frowning. _But really, Alfons, what else are you going to do if I stop now and we leave here together? How many more days at your home will I have?_

No. This was his sign. Signs from above didn't exist he figured, but humans had an amazing ability to warn themselves of things—like dear Alphonse not wanting to go along That Night—if only they could get their conscious mind to listen to it. There was nothing else for him here, and in that moment, looking up at Al's face, he felt his brother—a little shiver in his body accompanied by the feeling that the entire universe had to come together in his head.

Ed took Alfons's hands and clasped them in his own, smiling angelically. "You'll see, Alfons," he said, and then turned and ran for the center aisle. _And if this should happen to not work, well,_ he barely dared to think, wiping his still bleeding mouth on the back of his flesh hand, _I promise to be a vegetable and you won't have to feel bad about what you then have to put me through._

Alfons watched Edward run down the aisle toward the altar. Then, he found himself staring at his hands, and the ground beyond them.

"I've lost him," he whispered. "Completely. . . ."

A hand clasped on Alfons's shoulder, turning him gently around as he stared at his palms. _I didn't want this to happen, I really didn't! I didn't want to break you, I wanted you to be _all right_. . . ._

"It's all right, my son," the Cardinal's gentle voice cut across to him. "Some of God's children just need more help than you or I alone can give them to see the light on the path the Lord has given them."

"I'm sorry, Father," Alfons said, weakly, ashamed now that he hadn't just seen this truth sooner and had defiled the place by bringing Edward there. "He hasn't ever hurt anyone"—except whatever tonight was, and he felt a large pang of guilt about that—"but I've never seen him quite this bad before." Well, maybe not counting that night he'd found him, but that at least was a fully-acceptable circumstance of trauma in at least Ed's mind, regardless of whatever really happened.

"I'll try to keep him from damaging anything, but . . . ," he apologized, "just let him do what he will, then we'll have some evidence when the authorities arrive, I guess. . . ."

He clutched the Cardinal's sleeve. The man let him, nodding kindly, and Alfons found himself trying not to sob and hack. Quickly, he hid his face in his hand, only to after a few hot breaths turn away and hack out the irritation in his chest.

Suddenly weak, he fell into the bench and gripped the edge of it for dear life. The father's large hand clasped his shoulder tightly, and Alfons let it hold him up.

"That cough doesn't sound good. Are you sick? Able to get medicine?"

Alfons thought about lying it off as usual, but realizing that he had run here without his coat, at two in the morning, he quickly thought better of it. His baleful eyes trailed up to the statue, the domed ceiling and the stained glass depictions all around him. Yeah, probably better to just remain silent.

Ed flurried around the front pews, muttering and pulling up the heavy wooden things as best he could with his metal fingers the way they were—uncovered, so that they had less padding to take weight with. This surely was not his old automail: it could move less weight than his real arm could.

_Will it be enough— _ He looked at the eight pews he had turned into chevrons, eyeing the circular diameter of the opened area. He considered the floorboards, luckily waxed flat. Then he looked at the statue, considering it and the candles; he closed his eyes, and listened for anything he could hear from that _sense_. His whole body felt like it was buzzing, but there were no signs of his brother.

Ed hiccupped, realizing that if his Gate-given genius didn't help him in the next five minutes, his brother would probably be dead. For good.

He wiped his mouth out again, and, not letting himself think about what it might mean, he looked back to the two ghosts that occupied the rest of the room.

They were back there chatting, not getting him anything to write with.

"God dammit, do I have to do everything myself!"

* * *

"Well, this never can be easy on a person," the Cardinal announced. "On the good side, though, if something has been possessing him, it'll be gone now." Alfons nodded, barely, and mumbled an inaudible "Thank you." Cornello put on a quick smile for him, and shook his comparably thin shoulders back and forth a bit. "Shall I see if there's anyone that can come now, then?"

Alfons took a long, deep breath, and after an equally long sigh, he said to the floor, "I suppose it's gotta be done, I guess—I can't help him anymore."

"All right." Cornello gave him a squeeze on the shoulder. "You keep an eye on him, and if he asks, indulge his fantasies."

"Father?"

Cornello smiled, a bit sadly. "Do. It tends to keep them calm, and they can be more pliable that way, sometimes: if you don't try to stop them, but rather give them other, equally "plausible" options for whatever they're on a mission to do."

"Huh," Al smiled meekly, a little sick, as the cardinal moved off.

Alone. Alfons hunched in a little and found his hands clasping about each other for warmth. Since he was already there, he sighed and closed his eyes.

_Oh Heavenly Father—please don't let me be the one to have broken him at last. I didn't mean to. Not really._

_. . . But maybe he'll be happier this way._

Al snapped his head up, staring at nothing. As he lurched to his feet, he thought that he never would understand fate at times.

* * *

Ed did a quick three-sixty of the space he had cleared at the base of the statue. While Dante had opened the Gate with a simple array in a small space, that had been _on a baby—_someone whose soul was closer to the Gate. So, here . . . he figured he could use the same array because it was strong in its simplicity, and a symbol oft used, but it would have to be _big_, to overcome the world's enormous alchemic resistance. And if they weren't going to give him anything, well he would just have to try it himself—gathering that familiar energy in his soul, he spread his arms out, and then smacked them together.

There was a jolt of energy across his palms, burning across the back of his left hand. He put his hands into the floor automatically, and to his astonishment, black lines extended from his fingers over the wood until there was a fully-formed, black array, his body as its centerpiece.

"Wow . . ." He had felt the energy, but it was so second-nature that he hadn't really _noticed _it; it was as he always expected but never actually had _happen._

Ed sat back on his heels, and laughed. "I did it. It worked! Alfons, it worked! Hah—!"

Looking up, he found Alfons standing in the aisle, stark still. "What did you do to the _floor!" _he squeaked in horror.

Good God, it was _black_, what the hell had he done that _with?_ Surely not a grease pen, or the ashes like he had said, good Lord he could probably go to hell for that—

Wait. Alfons's head tipped down, to the parts of the design closer to his body. What did Ed have that could create something so big and evenly black, in so short of a time?

"Alfons," Ed said breathlessly, smiling beautifully and teary-eyed from his four-pointed crouch, "Can you tell me what that says?"

He pointed his hand back (his real one, thank God), to the top of the statue. Alfons tipped his head back, and considering the words of the Cardinal—and that the Cardinal wasn't back yet to protect him—hedged, "I don't _know_, Edward; I never learned faith-oriented Latin or anything. Here, let me _see_. . . ."

Ed watched with an impatient frown as Alfons tipped his head one way with a deeply knitted brow, and then the other way, and finally, back again. "Believe without sight?" he said, putting his hands on his hips. "'Believe? Belief?' Some conjugation of something like that, maybe."

Ed frowned, and his eyes swept over the floor. _That wouldn't make any sense in an array . . . would it?_

_ No.... It __does._

_ Believe._

"Ah-hem." Cornello cleared his throat off to the side of them as he approached from an anterior chamber, and both boys looked up at him.

"Oh, it's you," Ed spat, watching him distrustfully until he had fully cleared the circle. He realized after a while that he had started tapping his hands against the floor anxiously, several times a second while the man walked. When Cornello ignored him and got to Alfons, Ed stared at the strange pair for just a moment longer than he should have: They stared back, conspiratorially close, and a creepy feeling dripped over the back of his neck. When they turned their backs to him, Ed shook his head with a growl and went back to the design in the floorboards.

Alfons tried to not look as sick as he felt while the aged man clasped his shoulder tightly. "How did he do that?" the man asked rather jovially.

"I don't know," Alfons admitted weakly, voice cracking. "There was a "zzert" sort of sound, and then that was on the floor. I dunno, I didn't see. . . ." _Please don't throw me out. . . ._

"I'm just a speedy little bugger," Ed answered for them, resisting the urge to crow in glee again. "Actually, Father, can you tell me how to write a poem in that language you were speaking? And sooner rather than later—I don't have a lot of time."

Cornello raised a knowing eyebrow, and much to Ed's happiness, moved off of Alfons's shocked shoulders. "Sure I can. What is it?"

Ed took a deep breath, forced down a shudder, and recited with barely a breath:

"'The rainbow in the sky above,

"The spotted panthers, the green lion,

"The crow and beak blue as lead, these shall appear before you in perfect white,

"_Pale _white, and black with pale citrine imperfect,

"White and red the perfect feathers in bright colors,

"the rainbow in black with pale citrine—

"After the perfect white follows the grey—

"and after these shall appear the rainbow. . . .'."

Ed forced down a shudder and beamed his biggest smile. It was going to fool no one.

Cornello, however, didn't seem to mind, more like he wanted to pet Ed on the head, and that was what he was banking on. "You might have to recite that again for me, though. Was that English?"

Alfons looked horrified. Ed cringed, just a bit. "Yes. . . ."

The grey haired man nodded. "That's quite all right: We've got to have someone study the language, lest there be any brothers and sisters in faith still in the English-speaking world." Cornello smiled, the way that Ed was sure he'd managed to put so many of his followers at ease, and for once, Ed let him. "That's an interesting poem, though. Why would you need to know that? Not trying to cast a magic spell on us, are you?" he laughed amicably, a little chagrined at which particular design that happened to be on his floor.

Ed's teeth clenched. "Not really," he said after a second. "Just a miracle."

"A miracle?" Cornello asked, talking to him like a child.

Ed nodded brightly, playing into it. The relief of finally telling the truth, though, made it absolutely _slide _off of his tongue. He might never have to see these idiots again, ever, so what did it matter. The truth was going to being told: "I'm trying to get home."

"And where are you going home to?" he asked, bending down on his haunches.

"Somewhere far away," Ed said in a high voice, and then, a thought striking him, added: "To where the angles are." He held out his left hand. "Got a pen? If you don't have anything, just write in on my arm."

He left his appendage out between them, and when nothing happened, he forced a smile on his face. "Consider it . . . a blessing for me."

Surprisingly, Cornello smiled back. "Well, who am I to deny a believer something like that? If I may."

"Fine." Cornello's warm, clammy hand wrapped around his wrist and easily completely encircled it. Ed looked away and shuddered, choking down the sudden spike of revulsion from his memories. To begin with, being touched felt weird; ever since The Transmutation, he'd rarely had contact with another person's skin purposefully, and people outside of Alphonse, Winry, and Pinako certainly had little noble reason to. And since he'd come here, he couldn't afford touch; his father, thankfully, respected his distance. If it wasn't for Alfons's particularly touchy-feely tendencies, it would have been eighteen months in this dimension entirely physically isolated. It made him acutely aware of how sad he was as Cornello prodded at his skin, but it did nothing to help the pricks of pain it caused in his stomach.

And since it was the image of Cornello. . . . His skin crawled. But Ed bore it, the man rolling up his sleeve and firmly grasping him wrist. This was for Al. He could bare anything for Al, Al, who may or may not still be—

"Here we are," Cornello said, pulling the cap from a pen and pressing it to Ed's arm. "Once again, please."

They went over it, the scrawling going up his arm, reaching his elbow with ever-greater jitters in his spine, and then repeating from his wrist again. When it was finally over, the man released his thin arm quickly, marked in three straight rows. To Ed's surprise, it was legible.

He brightened, though, when he realized it was there, really there, and he gave both Alfons and Cornello a small smile before turning back to his array.

He rubbed his hands together, and held them out above the glossy floor.

"Miracle time, boys."

He slapped his hands together and there was resounding _clap._ He pressed his palms into the floor; he felt the energy surge and release in a rush. He was already buzzed and dizzy as light appeared in the floor, ringing the array in the form of letters, but the spinning words did not help. Still, he managed to stay upright and he watched with baited breath as the script dissolved off of his arm, letter by letter, and transferred to the floor.

Alfons yelped, and Cornello flinched appreciatively. When the reaction lowered away into nothing, Ed sat back, woozy and swaying, but smiling.

And then he realized that there was a large array in front of him, again. For the first time in so long.

"I'm really gonna do this," he breathed, suddenly afraid.

No, there was no time to worry about this. He had seen the Gate before and sorta "won" against it—escaped it—he could do it again.

He was going to get home. To Al.

He was about to put his hands to the floor again when he noticed the glimpse of feet at the edge of the circle.

"Eh–Edward?" Alfons asked. He was holding on to Cornello's arm for dear life and was looking much paler than normal.

"Stay back," Ed all but hissed. He threw his now-clean arm out to motion them away. "Out of the array. The lines. _Go, _I don't have time for this, move, move!"

But Alfons only came closer. "Edward, what—"

"For the love of all that is holy, Alfons, it is not your time yet, do _not _make me do that to you; _go_!"

That got the man to quickly back up, and Cornello had already done so. But still, Al asked again from the sidelines, utterly pained, _"Ed. What _are you—?"

"Goodbye," he managed to rattle off, just as he smacked his hands together. "Thanks again." He slammed his fingers into the ground.

Instantly, the energy exploded from the ground. Purple, spiraling light, and wind that rattled several of the pews around him. Ed felt like he was falling, the exhilaration of free-falling through the sky; the exchange of energy in his body overflowed as the little gate inside of him was thrown open as if by the transmutation's wind, and then flooded with energy, emotion, pure _light_, lancing out from the floor.

And then suddenly, it stopped. The buzz was still there, yes all of the emotion and the level of energy, just none of the movement. He had reached the peak, and then it had hit stasis.

There was only one reason for this.

He blinked, and suddenly saw what was before his eyes: His pale hands, and then ground between them—was yellow.

"_Hah—!" _he cackled like a madman, just as he looked up to see what on any other day would have been the scariest thing in his life.

His hands came up from the floor and pulled in against his chest, palms up and beseeching. "_Help me,_"he pleaded to the hellish statue, before he could think of anything else to say.

There was a considering moment, Ed thought he felt, in which the Gate did nothing. Its eye stared at him, as it always did; like eyes in a painting would follow his movements, the Eye in the Gate followed the thoughts in his mind.

"_Help me get back to my brother,"_ Ed whispered.

There was a great groan, and the Gate loomed closer. _Over _him, and its doors cracked slowly open.

"_What_ is _that?!"_ Alfons cried. A massive thing, taking the entire space of the sanctuary from floor to ceiling; around its crying figures and giant eye there was the faintest hint of feathered yellow light pouring into nothing. "Is that _Hell?"_

He turned to Cornello, who was now returning the grab at his shirtsleeve. There was wind, so much wind; he had no idea if the man had heard him.

_"It might be,"_ the Cardinal called back, never taking his eyes from the doors.

Al turned back, remembering Edward. Where the hell was _he?_ He glanced through the figures of moaning stone and only at the bottom did he find Ed—right where he had been. Though, no—he seemed too little and too far, sitting there on his knees—

Edward was on his _knees. Begging _for something. The youth slumped forward onto his hands: To Alfons, he seemed to be beseeching for something, from whatever this thing was.

Oh,_ traf eine katze mit einem ziegelstein_, this was not good.

And then, movement.

It was _opening._

"I have to help him," Cornello suddenly announced. He pulled out of Alfons's hands as if in a trance and pushed through the wind.

"No, don't!"

But the man of faith did not turn back. Alfons took in the entirety of the gargantuan monolith one more time and dove in after him.

"We'll all _die!"_

"I know!" Cornello yelled back at him. "Have some faith!"

* * *

_What can I give up? _Ed asked as he stared into that eye. _I have the Gate, and I know how to get through it, but I have no way to get to where Al _is _. . . I only have enough passage for just one of those things, and who knows if this is even the same Gate, if I can even get _through _it. . . . But I have make it, there's no other choice—!_

"Take me, _God dammit! _Take me to my brother so that I can _save him!" _The wind blasted forth from around the Gate, and as he spread his arms out, he could barely stay up against it, leaning into the gale everything he had. He was screaming into the sound, but could barely hear himself. "I'll give you all my memories of tonight, everything that got me to here, if you get me to where my brother is and let me save him!"

And then:

_ Can we keep you?_

_ Yes!_ "No you cannot keep me! You will bring me right back here when I'm done, dammit!"

And before he realized what he'd said, it was done.

"And what will you sacrifice for that?"

He was in the middle of drawing back when he looked toward the singular voice, somewhere within the blinding expanse of yellowish-white light. That voice was never good.

* * *

"He's in trouble," Alfons said, watching the tiny form of Edward suddenly stop its frantic movements, his head jerking to the side as if surprised. "Edward!"

"No, my son!" Cornello yelled, grabbing hold of him by the shoulders and pulling him back. "Whether this is the gate to heaven or hell, it is not your time to go there!"

"And it is yours?!" Al cried.

Ed had never quite had a real bargaining session with the Gate, and in realizing that he now _was,_ he felt the energies shift the tiniest bit. . . . Like "they" were waiting for something, the forces behind the Gate, or that something was about to snap on him....

You weren't supposed to be able to part and parcel things from the Gate. He had only hazy memories of what it was like in front of the thing—only clear in dreams; there were senses, in your head, telling you what was going on, that let you know the Gate accepted your transmutation or didn't. It was never . . . a _real voice._

"You're running out of time," it said, and sounded gleeful.

Ed shivered. Involuntary, cold, and horrible, all the way up and down his spine several times. He knew what he had to do. It made his legs weak, but pushing that aside, he let it hear exactly what it wanted: "I give up . . . . My ability to be there."

_ Not enough. . . ._

Ed shook his head. No, it should be, as paradoxical as it was, it should have worked—

"My memories of saving him, then! Whatever happens, take those memories too!"

He was starting to cry in desperation. As he threw his hands out in supplication, grasping at nothing in front of him, he wondered just what this Gate was. It demanded a price for things he said, apparently he couldn't renege on a decision, even if it wasn't a decision—he expected that from the Gate—but what was this thing doing? Drawing out time just to screw him over further? Seeing just how long it could hold him before it broke him like it had when he was a kid?

"Dammit, _take me there!"_ he cried into it, wishing, so hard, for the little black arms to come out.

_ "Edward!"_ he heard from behind him, and just as he whirled on his heel to warn it away, he heard,

_ We'll take this too._

"No! You can't! Alphonse, stay back!"

_ Watch us. _And then it laughed.

The arms were cold. The first ones that attacked his right arm were cold; he could feel it, even though there was nothing there that could receive the feeling. It was a cold that assaulted what he could only imagine was his soul, a pain crumpling him from the inside out, on more than one dimension of consciousness.

Then, as he swung his left arm out to warn Alfons to run as far as he could, they caught that one too, hot and flesh-searing. As he closed his eyes in pain, head tipped back, other little tendril hands snaked into his consciousness, making him see, feel, smell_, _and _taste _swaths of colors: green first, then blue and purple, red and then orange....Physical sensations, emotions, breaking into his head, meshing over his consciousness like clays all forcing themselves together to make something new inside his existence and forcing out his consciousness to put their mass in. He barely recognized his feet lifting off the floor before he lost his balance completely and was tumbling through the crashing sea of stimuli. There was ringing in his ears; he righted a little but was over-sensitized; his body—or was it the little pieces of energy that clouded around him and simply made "him" inside his mortal shell?—shook, and he begged to be cut to pieces to make each flaying nerve ending stop sending a signal to him.

In a sense, it obeyed. His violent, snapping muscle spasms and gasps were quickly outpaced by the feel of destruction pouring out the back of his head. Little feelings, being drawn from his skull, sending wet jolts down his spinal cord and ripples through his nerves; little feelings, being plucked out from the muscles, tissues, cells, and every piece of cytoplasm therein.

A locking cold stopped him from breathing and at the same time tightened him into a ball. While that was only the soup in which the coils of his memories sat in solution, every image of every moment of every memory in the last day flashed_ physically_ through his being and every memory of sensation registered in his mind at once. Each were plucked out, one by one, like movie reels or patches of a quilt, rending from his soul and playing before his eyes. His world and all its emotion went by in milliseconds that took unending quantities of time.

* * *

A/N:

...Cliffhanger'd!

Even moreso than the last time, yes?

* _traf eine katze mit einem ziegelstein. _This means "hit a cat with a brick." It's a phrase from german-speaking Iowan farmgirl grandmama, though I translated it (no doubt incorrectly) myself. Will try to fix later. In this case, it's the thought that counts, people, because it is so ridiculous I had to put it in a story. And Alfons is the perfect guinea pig for that.

Again, Beta by Hoho. (Hoenheim-of-light51)

And, btw, it IS okay to laugh while reading this story. It really is.


	5. Chapter 5

When his mind and soul coalesced back together, he was surrounded by a dimensionless milky yellow that had neither visible end nor beginning.

It was then that his body came back together with his mind, and he realized he was standing in the Gate.

_ Holy fucking hell,_ he thought,_ I'm in the Gate, and I don't know why._

_ What did I—_

His soul snatched itself back into its body from the yellow, pulling all three parts back together. His muscles responded. They collapsed underneath him, shuddering like they suddenly weighed several hundred pounds. He was falling to his knees _inside the Gate_, and then there was a _smack._

He was on a floor: cold, possibly dusty, his whole body on its side, lying still while his head spun. He realized he had fingers: he saw them in his view, at the end of an unresponsive flesh arm. His head was to the side, cradled against a black plane that he would assume was a floor. He had a leg, too; as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he could make out one foot . . . and then two, splayed unceremoniously somewhere beyond his knees.

As far as he could tell, he was all there.

He had no idea why he was there, but running as far away from the Gate as fast as possible was probably a good idea.

But, moving. . . .

The first signals didn't work. There was nothing that responded, until long into the amount of tries. Eventually, he got his shoulder to move enough to push himself over onto his back. The sensation was muted; there was barely any feeling when he hit the boards, even though a jagged splinter jabbed into back. The problem was in his fuzzy brain, then, not the nerves: he wasn't processing the signals that came in, and couldn't send any out.

He was muddled enough not to be able to consider if this was good or bad; the question flitted across his mind briefly, almost as letters across his vision, but every sense he had was sending itself through channels they shouldn't, and so he felt as if he were watching the world under water, without a body, despite the fact that he could see it laying out in front of him.

He closed his eyes for a while, and again asked himself where he was.

Despite the background humming in his brain, he could still see the images from when his eyes had been open; they registered more clearly, now, as a few seconds went by. He remembered dark hardwood floors, and walls; a window that was boarded up or heavily curtained somehow. . . . It did not seem like a place he wanted to be. Not a place where anyone could find him if he couldn't move to save himself.

It was cold, all very cold—

And then he remembered a memory being taken from him out of the Gate, the lances of ice it had put into his spine and how that jolt of cold circled around the muscles around his torso and beyond, and he immediately sat straight up.

The thought was lost from him in that short time; he sat, clutching at his erratic heart, trying not to throw up and not understanding why. He closed his eyes again and, sucking in air, pushed his head back with the hand that ran thickly through his bangs, his other hand still pushing into his sweating chest.

His teeth clenched; he felt his heartbeat in his throat and knew it was not supposed to be doing what it was. His stomach heaved a couple of times, and he managed to keep most of it down, though swallowing was well beyond him. When he tried to move again, he spilled back down into the floor, this time hitting his head on his arm. There, he let himself spin for a while.

Ed closed his eyes, ground his palm against his forehead and whatever else it touched on his head, took a breath, and _counted._

One. . . . Two. . . . Three . . . , three . . . . _ Five_. . . ?

He counted until he was so cold that he knew he had to move. So cold that he was finally a solid piece of matter, and the world had stopped spinning despite the fact that he had nothing to see.

With a breath, Edward opened his eyes.

They traced down the kick molding of a dirty wall in the dark; past a little rat that scurried in the middle ground of his vision; to the tread of black shoes. Slowly, as his eyes lifted from the floorboards he realized that he indeed saw the bottom of shoes, which were connected to feet, and then legs, and a body in dark, rumbled clothing slumped over in the bare corner.

. . . His brother.

Registering it as "unawake important person I think I know," Ed ducked down and surveyed the rest of the room as fast as he could, which was decidedly slow. Some of his nerves were still zinging, and redoubled their efforts when he moved his mouth.

"A'_hal_," he breathed after several tries. He unfolded his left hand from where his body had collapsed on it, and reached out to jiggle the toe of the closest shoe. There was no answer. "Alphonse. . . ."

Even in the near black, he could make out cuts on his face. His eyes trailed to bruises along his jaw, bloody patches on his neck that had bled down past his collarbone, and shiny spots on top of the large tears in his clothes. The bare hand Ed could see lay palm up, the thin wrist shackled to the floor.

Around them, there wasn't much. Several lengths of heavy iron chain wound around Al's body, and looking to the furthest corner of the room, Ed found the entire wall similar—piles of shackles or chain, a few spiked devices, and several pieces installed further up the wall.

Swallowing, he pulled himself with his one working arm via psuedo army-crawl the few feet he needed to reach Alphonse. Ed scooted up next to him in the snug space between Al and the corner, using the intersecting walls to keep himself upright and at the same time help him prop Al up against himself.

Finally settled, he reached to tip Al over, onto him. The moment his fingers touched Al's arm, a jolt went through his fingers into his brother. Ed jerked his hand back, fingers shaking in pain, and in the muted dark stared at his hand in horror. Why . . . was there a sudden feeling of emptiness in the middle of his chest?

Ed turned down to Al, and shook his head, scooping him up against him. He didn't bother with getting his right arm to work; it hadn't shown any signs of working thus far and he didn't want to aggravate Al's wounds..

He still couldn't feel anything against his shoulder, so he pressed his flesh hand against Al's chest to find a heartbeat and a temperature. There was wetness there, that was in fact cold, but digging under the gaping hole in his shirt, Ed felt around warm skin. Yet, however hard he tried, he couldn't feel two heartbeats through his palm.

"Al. Al," he whispered again, in the coaxing way he used to when they were little and Al was scared. Getting slightly under the small of his brother's back, he was able to maneuver his hand to Al's neck, even though it took a few tries to connect with the artery.

Afterwards, he ran his hand into Al's hair down the far side of his head—it was wet and a bit crusted there. He kissed Al on the crown of his head, pulled him close, and let his head rest in the crook of his neck. "Dammit, Al, what happened to you," he said, looking around the room and clutching at the fine strands of hair.

Illuminated by the little bit of ambient silver light leaking in from the boarded windows, he suddenly saw circles with chevrons dancing painted on the wall, about three feet from him. There were a couple, and then a third, an afterthought it seemed, written in dark . . . liquid, from the way it had bled down the wall before crusting.

His heart skipped a beat. Those were for electricity—

A noise went off in the darkness. A constant, high-pitched screeching, and . . . grinding, almost. Ed stilled like a rabbit: it was coming from below them, maybe two or more stories.

It was a belt sander, or a saw. . . . _No, _he thought, suddenly fueled with adrenaline. _It's a grind stone. With __metal grinding on it_.

"Jesus _fucking _Christ, Al, we've gotta get out of here," he hissed, ducking out from under his unconscious brother and steadying himself enough to see not only where his two hands were but where the metal he had to hit was.

He wasn't quite sure of the last time he'd done a transmutation, but it felt like a very long time when the energy spasmed through his chest like sluggish jello; it hit him a little harder than he was used to, and made him jerk a few times before he got his flesh hand down to the iron restraints on Al.

The first one did a combination of cracking and melting, and it wasn't as quiet as he had wished, though over the noise downstairs it would not have been noticeable. Still, his mind screamed at him to hurry, yet the adrenaline helped as much as it hindered. He was still barely able to stay upright on his _knees._

Just as he searched out his metal hand for the second transmutation, half crawling over his brother to do it, Al made a noise. Ed stopped immediately and looked down, pulling Al's head up and propping it on his knee. "What, Al? What did you say?"

He saw Al's eyelids move slightly, but to his sadness it was too dark to see much more than that. Al groaned, and his head rolled farther down into the crook of Ed's leg.

"Al," he hissed. "Stay with me, please. Hey, wake up, I have to get you out of here—"

"Brother. . . ." he whispered. It was more like a cadence of semi-coherent notes that told him that was the word, rather than actually hearing it, his voice was so strained and quiet. "Help . . ." Ed felt him fall into him farther, grow heavier. He took a breath, short and shallow, and then almost his complete weight was draping over Ed's front. "...Someone in my head."

For the second time that day, Ed stopped every muscle in his body, and his mind went blank as memories flooded back.

". . . Don't fight it, you should be okay," he said after what might have been a long time, though he couldn't help but think back to that zap when he had first touched Al's flesh. What exactly he had transferred with that. . . .

"Help. . . . Stop. . . ." Al continued to mutter uncomfortable, worn-out noises, fidgeting slightly as he moaned.

"Shh, shh, it's okay, Al, just stay with me, but you have to be quiet for right now. . . ." Ed smoothed over Al's hair for just a second before he went back to the last shackle, his own uneven breathing grating on his ears.

The blue light lit up the tiny space around his body as the second wrist bond cracked and dissolved, revealing Al's bruised, bleeding wrist.

Ed swore again, gathering Al up against him and readying to get to his feet. "I'm going to kill someone."

As he turned to the door, he realized that the machine downstairs had stopped. And rhythmically, steadily, as he pricked his ears to make it out, heavy footsteps took its place, thrumming one step at a time.

One, two. . . . Ed frantically looked around the room and realized that he had no idea how high they were, what could be below them, _who_, with _what_. . . . And the sounds of the steps was near enough that there could only have been two or three of them left before the figure came in, probably with a butcher knife—

Ed stared down at Al helplessly, to catch one last glimpse of him before he had to do something, and Al spoke:

"_Help_," he said, as his arms clasped the slightest bit around Ed's waist. There was an accent to the word.

Ed turned back as the footsteps reached the landing. They squeaked the floor in front of the door, and he readied his hands behind Al's back.

The door creaked open, a hand attached to it. It pushed into the room with the slowest speed. In a crack of moonlight, a man stepped through, first his feet, then the rest of him. It took Ed too long to make out the face, but it took him no time at all to remember it.

He pressed his alchemized hands into the wall and ducked just as Wilson recoiled at the two bodies on his floor.

The wood deformed around Ed's hands, rippled with a giant boom across the panels and burst forth at multiple points from the vertical plane into the air. Then, separated from their parent form, they hurtled through the air.

Ed forced his eyes shut and held them there, even though he knew he should be looking to see where the spikes went. He shut out the sounds of whatever happened at their points, and instead pushed his consciousness further into the growling wood, into the transmutation and the still-warping wood beneath his hands.

His right hand was finally working; he took it and pulled Alphonse close while they started sinking, the energy from the transmutation still channeling through Ed's flesh hand and wearing him down, like holding his breath too long. But they sank; he felt the outside of the building and pulled the floor's grains down toward it; he imagined being inside a raindrop of wood, and willed it into being as they slowly fell toward the ground outside.

The energy drained out of him like their descent, pouring from the vessel of his body into the very walls of the cocoon. His eyes were getting heavy and breathing was even more cumbersome, but the feeling was like a drug; the light cracking around them, flowing from his warm palms, must continue. His eyes glowing in the alchemic light, Ed held it, sacrificing every bit of energy he could will from his cells, until they hit a floor. A crack in the side of the teardrop spilled open, and Ed was hit with _light_.

The transmutation crackled dead, sucking remnants of energy back into his body with a jolt that forced him to breathe. He sat there for seconds, gasping, staring at nothing, body shivering. It was a long while before he realized he was actually cold, as well.

The curious sensation was coming from beyond their egg. The crisp smell of alchemy's reaction was still hanging in the air, but, tipping his head through the opening, there were other things: snow. Orange light bleeding over the ground—that would have been a street lamp.

Ed sighed, falling head first into Al, only his feet sticking out of their shelter. The snow was at least a foot deep, and he made a curious track in it. He didn't really feel like moving, couldn't even be sure he remembered what it felt like, but the colors around him were spinning, and it was not too pleasant.

His flesh hand found its way up to Al's head, and gently, he brushed stray strands from his face.

"Alphonse," he whispered, leaned over him, shivering slightly, his breath coming out in plumes in front of his face. "I missed you so much. . . ."

He went back to studying every line of his little brother's face in the light from the lamp, smoothing over the cuts and trying to wipe the blood from them, without success. "What did you do? How did you get in this mess? Be more careful next time. . . ."

Ed hiccupped a sob, and leaning back, exhausted, he twisted to look upwards. The split in the egg was spreading to the top; through it, he could see the side of the building from which they came. The masonry was as deformed and had devastating cracks; as he had hoped; large chunks of the three-story walk-up were gone from the room they had been in, and the snow falling down from the clouds was blowing into it.

No matter what neighborhood they were in, someone would've called the cops by now. Someone would come find them.

As he swallowed hard and dry with head tipped all the way back, savoring the cool, the wind shifted. The clouds overhead seemed to drop down, swirled, and then opened into a familiar black expanse. Ed stared at it, shocked, horrified, though his body could not muster a like response.

He licked his lips and then asked it: "So. What did I promise you, that this is happening?"

He couldn't remember where he had been before this, anything really, just that he was here now and he wanted to stay. He wanted to stay _badly_.

He shook the melting snow out of his eyes and bent down, picking Al up into his arms. "I love you, Alphonse," he whispered into his ear. "Don't forget me."

"Edward," came a voice against his cheek, weak, but with an all-too-familiar accent. "What's ... happ . . . ehng. . . ?"

Ed blinked out the tears from his eyes, even as more shuddered down. "Come on, Alfons, it's time to go home."

He reached out for his brother's hand, and as his consciousness started detaching and his body lifted up into the sky, he felt the soul's hand lift up away from the body, and continue to hold his own.

Even before the gates closed around him, he felt that memory stripping away from him. _I understand now,_ he thought, exhausted, to the little black hands floating near him before the pain hit. _You like happy memories because they make people sad when you take them. And you like sadness, despair, because it is the strongest emotion, filled with all the others. It's how you steal the most information from each human that crosses your way, and if you let them live but still take something from them, there's a good chance they'll come back to get it, and then you'll get to take _more.

_ And by becoming part of someone's memories, and then stealing them again, you're able to prove to yourself that you exist._

Ed blinked, slowly. His breath felt like it took eons, his body heavy and nerves fuzzy. The yellow sky did not abate.

_The Gate is the answer to all questions. But it must take its answers, first._

Unnamed demonlings' laughter bubbled up from the background, light and maniacal, a bed of burbling sound waves his tired consciousness could rest on. It was not scary, yet.

He looked over, listless, searching for Alfons's soul. He didn't have enough power left to enable thinking about where the body might be, or much else for that matter. While he felt so peaceful, however, the black hands seemed to be held at bay.

He wasn't sure how, or which sense exactly it came through, but he told his body to reach out for Alfons's ethereal hand and take it, and refuse to let it go.

"Hold on to me Al, so that we can make it back." He couldn't see the soul, but he was sure it was there, somewhere, floating in his general vicinity; it was like it gave out waves of energy with its continued existence.

"Whatever they're going to do, it's probably going to hurt, though," he revised as an afterthought. "I don't remember what I promised them. . . . And I can't afford to piss them off, I have to get home someday."

_I know_, Alfons's soul despaired. _It hurt before._

With that little twang of worry reverberating in his chest, the sadness and fear it offered, the questions with no answers, They were able to infiltrate. Ed curled into a ball, and tried in vain to protect his fragile, precious memories.


	6. Chapter 6

Ed realized he was lying on a floor, wooden and cold, after a time. His limbs were laid out around his view; his hair was spilled out to the side and what he saw was tilted. Beyond that, there were only shadows. Only they existed for a while, until eventually the black became shapes. In low light, he discovered long, dark benches, pushed against each other.

He suddenly thought of Lior, and his eyes trailed to a towering ceiling, the crest of which he could not see. He stayed still against the shining floor, listening: Voices, hushed? Footsteps that whispered across wood? The sounds of Cornello's men, waiting to shoot him in the back of the head?—

But there was nothing. His own breathing was the only sound keeping him company, along with the quiet movement of air. He closed his eyes and felt where the cracks in the floor pinched his arm; how deep the cold from the air had seeped into his body.

Occasionally, there was a soft, familiar crackle of candles, somewhere behind him. They let off very little light; he barely cast a shadow. They offered no heat, either—the room was cold, the floor was colder, and his side was quickly beginning to ache, a sting that ended in numbness. He had been knocked out like this before, locked in someone's storeroom or left where he lie in a bar.

There had to be something more to this than that. It was too strange.

He wondered if Al was waiting for him somewhere.

Slowly, he rolled onto his back and then his flesh arm. The movement felt both agonizing and wonderful, though in practice the movement caused his nervous system to vomit and go numb with the overload.

Forcing himself to move, he hissed and pushed into a sitting position, careful of his throbbing head and abruptly upset stomach. His insides felt like they'd rotted away. Either he'd been drugged or there was a serious concussion involved. Both had occurred in tandem before, if it was a _real_ good night.

Ed tipped his head back and felt his forehead once he got his arm working, drinking in the wonderful feeling of _air_ in his lungs. _Energy_. It felt like life itself.

When things finally stopped spinning, Ed blinked back against the darkness and considered his spot. Rows of varnished wooden benches were upset, and in front of him was a tiered altar, tiny red candles burned down far. There was a statue, and a massive arched ceiling; following the design around, he found the floor behind him, and a white-shirted lump that he couldn't remember why it was familiar. It was Al though, he knew. Why did it seem odd that Al had a body?

Ed reached out to crawl toward him, but his hand hung still in the air.

Alphonse didn't have a body. The Alphonse that was there was not Alphonse. It was _Alfons._

For a second, Ed just stared at his emotions as they crumbled in his chest and left a gaping hole where the idea of happiness had been. He looked around, and then at his hands. It was not that it was just _dark_, the colors were muted, and the metal was no doubt there. This whole world felt . . . _different. _Empty. Cold in a sense he couldn't describe. Like the whole place was telling him he didn't belong.

But here he was. The only tangible life he had. There was nothing concrete to hang onto—not the days, not the hours, that slipped by in his hands; not the language nor the operation of a world whose history he had never been a part of—except in how he'd stolen its energy as some dark force from afar.

In Ed's reverie, his eyes took in the form turned away from him: right now, that white lump face-down on the floor was the closest thing he was going to get to Al, the only thing that anchored him to this life. But he was strange, sad, and brainwashed; he was determined but for what? He was not Al. But at times the similarities were so striking that Ed remembered who he was.

The arm holding him up started shaking. Quivering, like extreme muscle fatigue or massive drop in blood-sugar, either of which were per normal if he'd been knocked out and unable to feed the automail.

But what . . . had transpired to get him _and_ Alfons in a situation like that?

_O_, but that he'd been having such a _nice _dream of his previous life.

Gingerly, Ed dragged himself over to Alfons, the compulsion to protect his brother pushing out all other thoughts for a few blessed moments. He forced his arm to work, ignored his automail, and tried to make his legs anything more than dead weight.

"Alfons. Alfons, wake up," he said, just over his head. Oh how his fair face and blond head looked so much like the one he wanted.

Ed pushed into Al's shoulder, only to get the worst spark of his life.

He found himself on the ground suddenly, staring at white. He might have cried or cursed; his voice rang in his ears but he couldn't remember actually saying anything. His automatic systems reconnected; he sucked in a breath that broke up the light he was swimming in, but it lingered on his retinas, flashing in and out of his mind's eye with varying squares of color.

Next to him came a groan, barely audible though Ed's gasping. He pulled his spasming limbs in closer and rolled onto his side, blocking out the flood of lights.

Al swatted at the limb that had been hitting him and then laid his forearm over his head. He stayed that way for a while, thinking, trying to think. Eventually, the purplexed frown visible under his arm depended to its maximum, and he sat up.

Al looked at Ed, who was breathing rather hard on his side; at the ceiling, of a church . . . which he did not remember going to; at himself; at Ed again.

And then, he saw the floor.

He sucked in a sharp breath and jerked. Like a trapped animal, he ducked down with his head tipped towards the heavens in fear; on his forearms, he checked hastily around again, and then pointed to Ed.

"Whah–What did you do!"

"Whahhzat?" Ed asked, rolling over and glaring at him with a massive headache. Whatever he was saying was thick and garbled, and he was completely oblivious as to whether it was German or not. He looked at Al and then rolled over, covering his eyes with his arm.

"Edward, the _floor!_"

Eventually, Ed grumbled and shrugged into movement. He rolled his head and to his surprise, black lines came into view, stretching out across the horizontal plain his head lay on.

What . . . the _hell?_

Alfons stared at the ground, his head moving back and forth. Ed sat bolt upright and looked at Alfons with huge eyes, and then the rest of the lines. He struggled to his feet, bracing heavily against the sharp contours of the pew to see the entirety of the design. The noise of his shoes knocking into the wood echoed around their alcove.

_That _array. Stretching directly out from himself—

. . . from _Alfons._

Ed stared, and Al tipped his head at him, a mix of an accusation and a scathing demand for answers. Ed turned back to the lines on the floor and swallowed, dryly.

That array. . . . Had someone seriously just tried to transmute Alfons? Of course it wouldn't have worked, but—

. . . Had _he?_

"_Munich_?" he asked Alfons. "Where are we?"

Alfons obviously had something else on his mind. He had ducked behind one of the pews, and was checking out the sanctuary. For a moment, Ed wondered if they were in another war.

But there were no bombs, no soldiers. The roof was in tact and there was no acrid smell of fire, of the smoke of bodies and possessions going up in an orange and black halo of malice.

Ed took a breath and tried to rationalize with his uncooperative thoughts: They were in a church: Okay. He was sitting in an array. Check, that would make sense if he had done it, though it would be terribly stupid. . . ?

They must have gotten horribly drunk, and either Alfons brought Ed here or Ed brought him here and then inexcusably defaced the building. . . . Wherever it was. It would explain the headache. The ache _everywhere_.

So Ed did what he always did in these situations: checked for angry mobs.

Over the geometric rows of pews, he saw no one, no heads; heard no voices. There was no one else around, and he didn't want to be here when someone found them.

"Come _on, _Edward!" Al hissed, already on his thought. He reached over the pew between them and hauled him forward. Ed was surprised enough that he complied easily, following after Alfons's flight to the door in hopes that Alfons was doing something because he had answers.

Al was convinced they were going to get fried for this. If he had let Edward do something like this to a church— Hell, he might have been plastered enough to go along with it; he certainly didn't remember anything and he felt like he'd just been run over. He definitely could have done something dumb like letting Edward in here, thinking it would do some _good—_

Just as he flung open the door his chest rose its ugly head and he stopped, hacking deep and flem-filled.

Edward was at his side instantly, drunkenly concerned, but Alfons pushed him off: he felt sick, he was tired, and he didn't know what the hell was going on.

"Leave, Edward, leave! We have to go before they arrest us!"

"Boys!"

They froze. At the far end of the sanctuary, a man robed in black with a grey head appeared, tiny in the distance, but it was all Alfons needed.

"Shit, Edward, go!" He grabbed Ed's shoulders and pushed him out the door, the blond's yelp cut off as he disappeared outside. Al jumped through after him, swinging the door shut to give them an extra few seconds of lead time.

"I'm sorry, Father, I'll apologize later," he assured the door quickly, and then bounded down the stairs after his companion, who was stumbling along down the street but taking his time, unaware of where he was trying to go.

Alfons didn't bother figuring out where they were; he simply ran, and for the first minute or so, he didn't have to hack his lungs out.

Father Cornello stared at the door, the sound of it pulling shut echoing in the hall. "They're . . . back," he said, confirming it to himself. "Where are they going?"

He had never asked the man his name. He knew the one was Edward, an English name that would be best not to repeat in the current climate, but . . . the one that had come to him . . . was who? And the floor. . . .

He'd better clean up his floor, before the believers came in for morning mass. That English boy had summoned a godly thing, but no one would believe it had come from a devil's symbol. No one would _want _to.

The asylum workers would be coming, too. What was he going to say to them? Mother in Heaven. . . .

Cornello wandered over to the janitorial supply closet, consumed. What prayer was it that he should recite, as he erased signs of truth on his floor?

* * *

Alfons let out a sigh as they finally reached their apartment. His lungs hurt from breathing in the bitter air, and his body ached in ways he didn't think possible. He couldn't afford to get sick, it was true, but Edward was barely conscious. Whatever small bit of clarity the small man had before had faded; as Al tried to get the key to the apartment out while bracing Ed on his shoulder, this became inexplicably apparent. Ed bumped into the wall, and he grunted as the bricks scraped them both.

After all the work of digging through his pocket and putting the key in the lock, he found it in vain: the door popped open on its own. Good Lord, he hadn't even remembered to lock the door during their drunken escapade.

Al grumbled and dropped Ed off on the nearest chair. He slipped into it gracelessly, and when Alfons found his own seat across from him, he sighed and let his head fall onto the table. He lay there, begging for sleep and wanting to cry at his stupidity—whatever it _was _that had caused him to wake up in a cathedral in the middle of a heathen symbol—while Ed leaned backward, equally exhausted, in his own chair. Alfons opened an eye and saw Edward's neck and the bottom of his chin; the rest of his head was hidden from view as it was staring at the ceiling. He was breathing hard, and the thin clothes exposing his chest quivered, probably just as much from cold as alcohol.

Alfons sighed, and searched one hand around the table without looking up. "I need a fucking drink."

"Give me some," Ed said, listlessly reaching out a hand, and letting it drop nowhere near the table. "We're already on a bender, right?" he asked as an afterthought, most of the words German.

Al growled, disgusted, before he stood up and stumbled over to the sink. The urge to cough again hit him hard, and he hacked into the sink. "I b'lieve so," he grunted, running his hands under the ice-water. "I think we robbed a church or something."

"What the fuck? Why would we do that?"

"Maiunno." Al shrugged, searching for glasses and any bottles as he leaned on the counter. The glasses were found easily, right where they always were, but the beer he'd bought was something else. He looked around for it, finding himself surprisingly able to keep track of where it might be. "Edward, see th'bottle?" he asked.

"Mmmnn." Ed's head was on the table now, but by his leg he was playing with the neck of a glass container. "Thi—iss?"

"Ah!" Al stumbled back over, plucking the drink from Edward's hand. For a moment he considered how much to give each glass . . . already sitting in front of him . . . but then he decided he shouldn't bother. It was New Year's, Edward was his friend, one or both of them had just committed some sort of crime. . . . Yeah, he wanted all he could down.

To his surprise, there was a large amount of the alcohol left after he poured the portions out. It didn't quite register how they could both be so drunk with so much left, but his thought to cover the inconsistency was that he must have drunk a ton at the beer hall.

In the dark, Al sat down and threw back a massive swig; he sighed as it hit his head. It made him warmer, even though the liquid coated his throat and made him sputter. For a long time, he just appreciated the quiet; pieces of him ached like he had been using them for days. Jesus, he didn't have the flu _and_ was fucking drunk? How could he ever think _that _was a good idea?

"Damn, Edward, you make me make some bad decisions sometimes," Alfons laughed and groaned at the same time, rolling his forehead on the wood.

Ed swirled his glass. "You do the same to me, I think," he said, though he sounded unsure.

"Mm, glad we have that under control now," Al offered happily. He hiccupped, though it was half a sob. He was being hysterical, and he _welcomed_ it.

"Mn."

Al rolled his head, but then he laughed, a desperate one. "Edward, what the hell were we doing there?"

"You know, I don't really remember." _Tell me I didn't try to kill you. What could have _possessed _me to think that transmuting you would actually be a _good _idea?_

Ed shook his head. "You think we were fighting or something?" It was possible he'd just been doing drunken alchemy, Al had socked him, and they'd managed to knock each other out. Please let it be only that.

. . . In a church. Oh, maybe Al had dragged him to church and he had thus protested. That made sense.

"I hope I get to the point where we can laugh about this," Al muttered, rather hopelessly. "I don't want to go to hell for defacing a church."

"You could do so much _worse _to end up in Hell instead," Ed waved his hand, like that was some sort of acceptable agreement. He shrugged. "I'd think this was it, if you weren't around."

Al turned and stared at Ed from his angle on the tabletop. "Whaddo you mean."

Ed tipped his head back with a groan, and Al got the distinct impression that his eyes were closed. Suddenly, his left hand snaked out, and caught Alfons's own, hovering on his knee. It was cold, Al realized, and quivering like a leaf. Not just cold, but _fear_.

"Al, I feel terrible," he said. "There is no hope without you."

Alfons stared at the hand. This was the first time Edward had ever dared touch him on his own. There must have been something behind this. Maybe this . . . was his chance.

"Edward, where did you come from?"

"Far away."

It rolled off of his tongue easily. Alfons frowned, and cursed.

"Edward, why do you always avoid my questions?"

"Because you don't want to know the truth."

"How do you know that?"

"I just do."

"Then why do you tell me "true" stories all the time instead?"

Ed's head tipped to the side a little, and when Al looked, he was being watched through slits of eyes. It made Al's skin crawl—raven eyes on the ragdoll body. But all Ed said, ever so gently, was: "Because you smile when I tell them. And that makes me feel better."

There was a long pause. It was so simple. And yet.

"Edward, what are you trying to outrun?" Al put his hand on Ed's right leg. He tensed suddenly, but then relaxed. Al gave him a smile and a pat, like his mother used to do. Ed was mortified, but in a futile way. Ed might have smiled a thank-you, if he wasn't frowning so hard.

". . . The past," he answered softly, closing his eyes. His hand came down on Al's, gently, trapping his fingers in his smaller ones. They lingered there for a second, and then he returned them to Al's leg. Al stared after them.

"I'm just trying to make everything right before I die, you know? Spare people the pain I went through," he said, stiffly, abruptly staring at the far wall. Al couldn't make out anything but the back of his head, his nearly undone ponytail trailing down his back in the dimmest sliver of moonlight. Ed swallowed then, a small gasp of breath and the tilt of his head. ". . . That I'm _still _going through."

Al cocked his head in return. It seemed like Ed was looking for someone to tell him he was forgiven.

"You know, things shouldn't all have to hurt like that."

"I know," came Ed's soft voice after a moment. "But you still hurt too, don't you?" He rolled his head back over towards Alfons, and declared quite simply, "You know I would never hurt you, right, Alfons? You're my friend. My _only _friend."

He sounded lucid. Al was on the edge of believing it. But it was true—if he didn't believe in something, he would have no beliefs at all. And belief . . ._ faith. . . ._

They had been in a church, hadn't they? And he had no idea how they'd gotten there. Maybe this, maybe this was because of God. It was time to notice something, notice the chance when it came.

They had both been in that church. They had both been struck, perhaps.

Edward had been there too . . . little Edward, golden-haired and troubled and staring morosely at his mug.

Edward, the warm-hearted youth with the mouth of a sailor, currently slouching pathetically in his seat and swishing around the drinks.

_Save me._

It was a voice, a sense, and he wasn't sure where it came from.

Suddenly, there came to Alfons the idea of Edward gone, of the chair in front of him suddenly empty. It would be as if he never were, and no one would have known but him. . . . And Alfons, too, would soon have an empty seat at this table, and if there not Edward, there would be nothing.

So maybe Edward was . . . a gift? Maybe . . . Edward was his gift, a thing to protect and comfort. Maybe Edward was his to save.

He took a breath, and it felt light. A floating warmth, all around his body.

Maybe, in doing so, there would be an answer. Dare he even hope, a salvation.

His prayers had certainly asked for more.

He considered his glass, chugged the rest down, and turned to face Edward completely.

"You know, Ed, I don't have Tuberculosis, if that's what you've been wondering."

"Tuber -huh? I'm sorry, that word—"

A bit scared, a bit depressed, and not daring to stop moving forward, Al patted his chest. TB, he remembered it being called in English. He tried the Latin as well, just for good measure, until it visibly dawned on Edward what he was talking about. His face lit up like a light at getting the concept, and then immediately twisted to one of horror.

Al waved him off. "I've had it checked out, at great risk to both of us, thank you very much. It's not that. I would never endanger you if it were that."

Ed looked surprised. It hurt, a bit. ". . . Really?"

Al scowled, but tried not to let the bristle in his back get into his voice. "If I had it, you would have caught it by now; you'd have had no chance. You'd _die_, Ed," he said very gently, whispering. "Very quickly. And of course I don't want that."

Ed stared, and Al glanced down. "So you really are . . . just worried about me?"

Al nodded, glum.

"So what do you have, then? It's going to get better, right." The face of his brother was telling him of a his death sentence. He tried, but his brain refused to differentiate the circumstances, and he was willing to let it, for this. This Al was precious to him, and he would use every resource he had to protect him.

"I don't know," Al said eventually. "I'm not sure. _They _don't know. It's just . . . damage. My lungs are deteriorating. They don't know how it's accruing."

Ed bit his lip.

"Don't die," he whispered.

"I don't know if I can promise you that."

He sighed, and Ed could find nothing to say. There were no condolences, no cheer that would help news like that.

Just like . . . his mother.

. . . Just like Alphonse, whose life's clock could stop ticking at any moment.

Ed was struck, suddenly, at how much Alfons in that sad slouch suddenly resembled the memories he had of his brother when he had caught him unawares.

There was no question: the message was staring him in the face, the most obvious and clear idea he'd had since "get back home." He was protecting his brother. And if this was his brother, what would he do?—

"I'm sorry," Al said kindly to his shock. He reached over and patted Ed on the head. "I want to believe your stories, Ed, but I _can't_. I'm not capable. I know you want me to believe them but I'm not that type. Believe me, I've tried. Who _wouldn't _want to believe them?"

His smile ticked once, and just as quickly disappeared under the weight of things unseen. "So, if you could, go easy on me, Ed. Your genius seems like madness and it's exacerbating sometimes, when I'm trying to stuff formulas in there, too." He tried to smile, but deflated as it fell. Ed felt a nasy pang in his chest as it did so. "But really," Al continued. " . . . more than that, I want us to love what lives we have left, not break each other into the ground. I have enough things to suffer for. I don't need it from you, too. With you, the real you, I could have a happy life, the rest of it. . . ."

Ed's eyes flicked up. _Things to suffer for . . . ?_

"For me? Please?"

—If this were his brother, he'd save him at all costs. Of course. And he'd knock him around for being a fucking _moron_.

"And don't forget," Al said, with a suddenly bright countenance that was a little loopy, "You've got Jean and Dorchette and all those guys. I bet they'd warm right up to you if showed them all that loyalty and less of that monsoon around the lab."

"Mon . . . soon?" Ed asked, tasting the word in his mouth.

"Yeah," Al said, leaning his head on his fist, an easy, oddly graceful gesture that he wished he could've seen on his own Al. "The sudden furious storm. The . . . downpour," he added, in English, with a little hand gesture that indicated rain falling down to the table.

The . . . downpour, Ed thought, turning to the window above the sink. It was dark, but perhaps, over the edge of the horizon was a cresting dawn.

Rainstorms, after which the light shined. . . .

He thought of the Gate suddenly, its shining expanse with a horizon that could be felt but never seen, and its equivalent exchange.

_"I have this feeling . . . I _need _you._"

Healing alchemy.

Ed turned his head back to Al, and stared straight through his cornflower blue eyes. So wrong, and yet so amazing, this body on the other side of the universe.

It was worth it to someone. Even if that someone was to be only himself.

Fixing this Al . . . could be his price. Maybe, just maybe, in helping this Al his answers would appear. It was not fate. It was just . . . the universe demanding an exchange of deeds before he could go home. This Al, already dying, he'd save from himself, just the way he had injured his own Al and had to amend that. It was a strange sort of parallelism, to the point that it just might work. Like the steps in orbiting bodies, drawn to each other: A planet had to orbit a star before a moon could orbit a planet, allowing all three to coexist, and everything else out there, too. . . .

It was his own choice to do or not do, of course. It was the universe, in constant motion around him, but he may finally be able to get his corner flowing again—

And after that . . . he didn't know about after that. But he might just be free.

Ed laughed, hysterically, hollowly, and put his arms over his head. Both elbows hit the table, and one made a loud _clunk_.

His heart was beating again. He couldn't believe it, but he could feel it. And it felt good, a purpose he could hold in his hands. A future he could work towards. His father could stay in Hell and he might just be all right.

Alfons's brow furrowed, and he tipped his head in that cute way he did when he was perplexed. Figuring he was still completely buzzed, he found no reservation at all against plucking Ed's nearer arm off his head and clunking the elbow against the table again.

"What?" Al asked in his guttural speech. It felt like . . . thin rubber over . . . wires? And imagine that, it made a crinkling sound.

Ed stared, horrified, as if he didn't know he had metal attached to his arm. Metal that . . . _was _his arm, apparently.

"Hm." Al yanked Ed's wrist over and prodded at the elbow. Finding it metal underneath as well, he tapped Ed's shoulder. There, too.. . . Frowning, he sat back and considered Ed's right half. His _whole arm_?

"Edward," he said, as if he'd never seen him before. "Your whole arm's _metal_?"

Ed laughed, once, high and strained. And then again. There were no words for hearing Alphonse say that like it was strange.

However, Al didn't seem to mind. He snorted. "I know you're sauced but try to pay attention." Ed's giggling was apparently a hard thing to quit. Al reached over and knocked against Ed's shoulder until the pitch abruptly changed.

Ah, flesh. He pinched it. Ed automatically reached up to take Al's hand away, but stopped, halfway. Al made another thoughtful noise, feeling around Ed's trapesius and clavicle and forcing him closer to the table. It wasn't a completely unpleasant sensation. With a sigh, Ed was reminded of his days with His Al, trying to take the knots away from his muscles, even though—oh, hello, he was now face-down against the table.

"Where'd you get it?" Al asked, curious. This gave Ed's stories a reason, a point from which to spark. Suddenly, he could appreciate the creativity of them—creativity which was not insanity. All of that, built around one metal implement. Al traced along the edge of the casing with his worn fingertips. His other hand was flat in the middle of Ed's back, forcing him down.

"You aren't afraid?" Ed asked, trying to look up. Actually— "Why aren't you freaking out?"

Alfons fluidly pushed him back down. "Edward, this is fascinating mechanical science," he said in his best haughty tone. "There _is_ no 'freaking out'."

". . . Oh."

"Edward, I make _machines _for a living," Alfons continued. "Why would you think I would do anything other than demand proper love of such a beautiful feat of engineering science!"

"I hope you don't expect an answer to that," Ed muttered beneath him, cheek smashed against the table.

Al sniffed and moved the shoulder joint, showing no signs of letting him up. "So. Where'd you get it?" Ed watched Al pull his wrist back, before he could think to tell him to be careful. His arm disappeared from view, and he heard the gears work, behind his head. Oh great, that was an arm lock, wasn't it?—

Well, he did always win. Even this one, which had the height on him in the flesh, too. Sometimes, the universe so kindly offered so many cruel creature-comforts to his psyche.

"And no lies."

"Dad made it," Ed responded abruptly, so that he wouldn't have to think about it. While Al made a thoughtful noise, he waited for the yea or nay of believability.

Von Hoenheim, Al wondered, as he held Ed's arm. He had come back to Germany for no apparent reason. Maybe he was working for the government . . . or even better, the forward-moving parts of it.

Hell, he might even be on the lamb from the Brits. The idea titillated Alfons's senses like nothing else, all his days of dime novels coming back to him with a vengeance.

"Al?"

"God, Ed, you're back's a mess." He leaned into his spine and there was a gigantic series of pops and _crrrks_.

"Holy f—what was _that_?" Ed yelped. Though, . . . now it felt kinda tingly. . . .

"So, can I see it?"

Ed frowned. "What?" He tried to twist around, but Al made it impossible. He grumbled in protest, but Al made it clear he didn't care.

"You wanna _see _my arm? _See _it?"

"Take off your shirt, dammit. The doctor wants to see the insides of his patient."

Ed pressed his forehead against the table, and luckily, it was cool. "_God,_ Al, you're drunk. You're not touching _any_ of me when you're sloshed. You'll break it." He sighed. "And you'd have to let go of me, anyway, at which point I'll get away."

Al seemed to be debating the logistics of preventing such fleeing. Eventually, still holding Ed flat, he asked with innocent curiosity, "If I let you go, you'll promise me you'll let me see it when I'm sober?"

Ed chuckled, in spite of himself. It seemed like something his Al would say, a deviously clever plot that abused his power to lock Ed into the ground in order to fulfill a desire that was completely innocent and arbitrary. And yes, he was being a bastard for seeing this man only in those terms, but it was a sweet sort of sustenance for his soul and Alfons seemed quite agreeable to the treatment at the moment. They were secretly more alike than he could ever imagine.

But Ed had not lived with Alphonse's game for so long without learning something in return. "I'll let you see it if you agree to work with me on helping your lungs."

Behind him, Al made a small, fretful noise. He let Ed's prosthetic go, but stayed out of sight; his hands gripped the back of Ed's chair.

"Edward," he said quietly, "I have no parents. No family; I'm sick. Only my ideas are worth saving, don't kill yourself for it."

_No . . . family. _Ed frowned. That . . . was not what he was expecting.

It would explain some things, though. Particularly the mania about working and why he never went anywhere, never talked about them; why Al's backup plan was always Alfons himself. It seemed somewhat . . . familiar, though, and not just because of his own life. An idea, a memory, rattled around in his brain, but he couldn't quite catch it.

He shrugged, and heaved himself off the table. Maybe he was mixing up someone else's story. A ton of people had lost family in the past few years.

Rubbing his shoulder, Ed sat up and turned to the specter of his brother, standing with one side visible in the soft moonlight. His look was sad, and after a second of keeping Ed's stare, his eyes flickered down to the floor.

"Al, if you're not worth saving, neither am I. And if so . . . no one will care if we save each other." He let that settle, and in the silence, stated, "I'd like to save you."

"I don't think you can," Al said, frankly. He did not smile. He looked at Ed, the clear, intelligent eyes darting back and forth as he waited. When Ed just glowered back at him, Al sighed, looked at the ceiling, and tapped his fingers on the creaking chair, all the while frowning.

And then he looked to the painting of the saint, at its place next to the window.

_ I'm not handing my life over. I'm just . . . making a trade._

"I think I might not mind you trying," he offered with a sigh. "Help me with my research and I'll cooperate with you on this." His hands gripped the chair so hard they were white. "Help me leave something for you, for the world, before I die."

_Even if it's just a . . . treatment. That's good science too, right?—saving people. . . ._ _It's not my goal, I'll work towards something else, but . . . it'd be good._

He looked back down to the gold-haired foreigner sitting in his chair, only to find that he was beaming.

"_If_ you clear it with me first and give me solid medical reasons as to what you try," he amended, quickly.

"Deal."

The smile lingered. Al frowned at Ed, his hair silver-etched where the moonlight hit it. "What?"

"I just like watching you. What would you call it? 'A . . . miracle to behold,' maybe."

Al put his hands on his hips. "What in the world do you mean by that? You don't ever say things like that, what else is going on in there?" He thunked Ed on the head with his knuckles.

His lips pursed, and Ed grinned like a devil. He glanced off to the side quickly to hide it, and noticed with a start that it had begun to snow, the last of the light soon going behind the clouds.

"Edward?"

He smiled back up at Al, his Al. There were two in the universe, inextricably linked, and he was the solitary one that was bestowed with the grace of both. That odd feeling in his chest, over his shoulder, was gone as if it had never been for the first time in months, and he wondered at how much weight seemed to have lifted from him. Having two Als might just make him . . . lucky.

His grin turned wicked.

"What'll you give me for my leg?"

"Your _leg?_"

* * *

"_Alphonse Elric, do you still swear and testify as truth that this man tried to kill you on the night of December the 31__st__ of this year past?"_

_ "I do." He figured the healing patches visible on his face stood for themselves._

_ "Then I hereby sentence C.A. Wilson to a term of twenty-five years to life, for the attempted murder of Alphonse Elric, may you actually make it to jail this time."_

_

* * *

_

Against the background din of the city, Al descended the stairs of the courthouse, and for a moment, watched the heavy clouds drift across the oddly sunny sky, hands in his coat pockets to protect against the chill wind. What it must look like, having someone with this particular coat around capitol hill again. . . .

"Alphonse Elric," came a stern voice from behind him.

"Yes?" he turned, and not unexpectedly, found a spread of military personnel making a wall of blue and black on the stairs above him.

"If that is your real name . . . ," said the speaker, broad-shouldered and stiff, with a bit of grey patches around his temples, "Where is your brother, Edward Elric?"

Al turned to him fully, well aware that he wasn't getting out of this with a brush-off. "He's what I'm looking for."

"Looking for."

"Yes."

"Then why are you dressing like him?" asked the man immediately to the left, brown-haired and tall.

"Am I _impersonating _him, you mean?" Al replied in the most civil of tones, though he couldn't help but smile a little. They couldn't really tag him with impersonating an officer when Ed never wore a real uniform, though they could probably get him for something about misrepresenting himself as one. He shrugged. This defense had been ready for a _long _time. It made him a bit terse that they would actually try it, though.

"For one, I'm a poor farm boy from the country. For another," he said, turning to the first officer with his glare hard, "I'm keeping his memory alive, because in this time the people need their heroes."

_I'll become one myself if I have to._

He smiled, and gave them a little salute. He hoped it would remind them enough of Ed (though Ed rarely, if ever, did it), that it would frustrate them even further. "If we're done here, gentlemen, I have to talk to the papers, and meet with someone who contacted me because of the case."

The shunting train was rhythmic music to his ears, and as it made its way through the mountains north, Alphonse took a moment to stare out the sunny window to the green-and-white spotted hills of dense pine forest stretching almost endlessly into the distance.

_I wonder if, when I find you again, I'll find out that you had something to do with saving me, and you'll tell me all about how you did it, without me having to even open my mouth?_

_ Of course I know you wouldn't have left me there, but it felt like there was someone else there, _in _my body, in those few seconds of consciousness I had, that was _not _you. . . . And now, when I dream, I see you, through an older version of myself_---_it's no longer from your point of view. I'm not sure what to think about it, brother. You look so old. . . . Is that still you? Or have I finally found the evidence that I'm just making this up?_

Al let up his pencil, then tapped it against the paper. _Other worlds,_ he thought. _Didn't Wrath say something about 'The World in the Gate'. . . ?_

He frowned, making note to write it in his research book after he finished the letter. _But I have to tell you, I think it was you,_ he continued._ I think you heard me, somehow, and in your genius ways found a way to get to me. You look for me where ever you are, and I'll continue here; hopefully we'll have enough to meet in the middle._ _ I know you would never abandon me, brother._ _I'm not going to abandon you._

_And besides, _he wrote, glancing at the absolutely massive man with one single curl of blond hair across the entirety of his forehead, _the trial of this case has brought me quite a few old friends of __yours__ ours_ _that may just lead me to you._

"What are you writing so furiously there, Alphonse?" Armstrong asked, peering down over Al's shoulder from what seemed like seven feet up.

Al smiled, even though he didn't stop hunching over the little, well-worn book. "I'm writing to him," he said. "Because when I find him, I want to tell him everything he's missed. I don't want to forget a thing."

* * *

End Note:

And that is how you do that, my friends! ~smacks hand down on table.~ I'm elated at the work at the work as a whole and for finishing it. ...Just a little.

Do you remember who Wilson is yet? No? A ha ha ha ha. Still as confused as Al, I guess. I'll tell you if you ask in a review....

And yes: I'd definitely like to know what you thought about it. I have no way of knowing who reads these or what they take away from it if you don't say something. I don't bite, really. :]

Thanks for reading! it took me about 3 years to write _Winter's Eve _overall, but I really love it. Each chapter is fantastic for its own reasons. *le happy sigh* I hope you've enjoyed this as much as I have, and am able to come back and learn from it time after time. "There is always hope that can be found," I'm thinking.

Best Wishes,

Gani


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